Prospects and challenges for chip-level optical interconnects

The use of chip-level optical interconnects (OI) in short-scale IC applications was investigated. For this purpose, a research was conducted in which a 3D free space OI platform, which allowed a new IC architecture to take full advantage of parallel architectures, was used. The 3D architecture consisted of arrays of vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VSCEL) and detectors connected through a reconfigurable optical medium. It provided the highest interconnect density because photons virtually do not interact with each other and can occupy the same point in space. The study show that OIs are beneficial due to wide bandwidth, reduced loss, and low crosstalk.