Chapter Merging Plasmonics and Silicon Photonics Towards Greener and Faster “Network-on-Chip” Solutions for Data Centers and High-Performance Computing Systems

Abstract:

In recent years it has become evident that the increasing need for huge bandwidth and throughput capabilities in Data Center and High Performance Computing (HPC) environments can no longer be met by bandwidth-limited electrical interconnects. Besides their limited capacity, electrical wiring technologies impose great energy and size limitations originating from the requirements to handle the vast amount of information that needs to be exchanged across all hierarchical communication levels within Data Centers and HPCs, ie rack-to-rack, backplane, chip-to-chip and on-chip interconnections. This reality has inevitably led to a clearly shaped roadmap for bringing optics into the spotlight and replacing electrical with optical interconnects, thereby overtaking the bottleneck in traffic exchange imposed by electrical wires [1]. Hence, the optical technology should penetrate into intra-rack and board-to-board transmission links, considering that the optical fiber as a large-bandwidth transmission medium [2] is used only in commercial systems for rack-torack communication [3].

Año de publicación:

2012

Keywords:

Fuente:

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