Silicon microphotonics for fast integrated circuit connections

摘要

Electrical connections inside VLSI chip will become one of the bottlenecks for the increase in performances. This is due to the shrinking of lateral dimensions of electrical links concomitant to operation frequency rise. Optical distribution of data on global links may improve the synchronism of the delivery while reducing the required power, as well as freeing the routings on the higher metallic layers (data clock delivery for instance) An optical connecting system is architectured using basic blocks operating in the near infrared. Integrated light emitters are coupled to silicon optical wave guides which constitutes an optical distribution. At the end of these waveguides, photodetectors transform the optical function results in electrical signals which are processed by the underlying integrated circuit.