Silicon Photonics for Extreme Scale Systems

High-performance systems are increasingly bottlenecked by the growing energy and communications costs of interconnecting numerous compute and memory resources. Recent advances in integrated silicon photonics offer the opportunity of embedding optical connectivity that directly delivers high off-chip communication bandwidth densities with low power consumption. This paper reviews the design and integration of silicon photonic interconnection networks that address the data-movement challenges in high-performance systems. Beyond alleviating the bandwidth/energy bottlenecks, embedded photonics can enable new disaggregated architectures that leverage the distance independence of optical transmission. This review paper presents some of the key interconnect requirements to create a new generation of photonic architectures for extreme scale systems, including aggregate bandwidth, bandwidth density, energy efficiency, and network resources utilization.