Optical interconnections in future VLSI systems

Abstract

This paper is focused on the latency and power dissipation in clock systems, which should be lower when the optical interconnects are applied. Simulation shows that the power consumed by an optical system is lower than that consumed by an electrical one, however the advantages of optics drastically decrease with the number of output nodes in H-tree. Additionally, simple replacement of an electrical system by an optical clock distribution network (CDN) results in high clock skew, which will be higher than 10% of the clock period for the 32 nm technology node.

Keywords

• optical interconnects
• clock skew
• clock distribution network
• OCDN
• OVLSI