Design of reconfigurable on-chip wireless interconnections through Optical Phased Arrays

Abstract

In this paper we report the design of a device allowing on-chip optical wireless interconnections, based on transmitting and receiving Optical Phased Arrays (OPA). The proposed device aims at realizing high-bandwidth and power-efficient reconfigurable connections between multiple nodes, e.g. chiplets stacked onto a common silicon interposer in 2.5D manycore systems. The communication through an optical wireless switch is a completely novel approach to overcome the bottleneck of wired communication and to provide flexibility in the network topology configuration. We report the OPA design criteria as well as the results of three-dimensional Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) simulations. We exploit the in-plane radiation of simple taper antennas to implement 1×N and N × N switching matrices. The effect of the multipath propagation in the on-chip multi-layered medium is also taken into account.

Reconfigurable Optical Wireless Switches for On-Chip Interconnection

“…The proposed 33 OWS exploits OPAs made by N=5 taper antennas, both at the transmitters and at the receivers. This configuration with five elements, different with respect to the one proposed in [26], has been chosen as it allows addressing separately all the three nodes of the switch, as detailed below, thus minimizing the crosstalk and maximizing the device performance.…”

“…In this paper, we focus on optical wireless interconnect technology which can enable the implementation of Optical Wireless Networks on-Chip (OWiNoCs), to exploit the best of both wireless and optical communications. Despite pioneering research efforts [24][25][26], optical wireless interconnection is still in the early stage of development and its potential is not yet completely explored. However, the feasibility of the approach is supported by the consolidated optical fabrication process and by the demonstrated integrability with CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology.…”

“…In [26], we proposed the concept and a first design of an Optical Wireless Switch (OWS) based on transmitting and receiving Optical Phased Arrays (OPA). In this paper, after an initial focus on the architecture of the proposed device, we discuss in detail the characteristics of the antenna element used in these Phased Arrays and then illustrate the radiation patterns as a function of the applied phase shifts, highlighting the variation of the gain in the different configurations.…”

“…We then report further results obtained by optimizing the design of a 33 switching matrix. Differently from [26], in this work we exploit the use of five antennas in each OPAs. Moreover, the effect of multipath propagation in the multi-layer on-chip structure is taken into account, and the impact of the cladding layer thickness on the final performance is evaluated.…”

Design of Plasmonic Yagi–Uda Nanoantennas for Chip-Scale Optical Wireless Communications

“…In addition, more complex architectures were proposed on massively heterogeneous processors using optical wireless communications, whose unique terahertz graphene nanoantenna beam reconfigurability demonstrated feasibility for computer architecture communications [ 2 , 3 ]. In the optical domain, on the contrary, reconfigurability at the on-chip wireless interconnection level can be reached through multiple transmitters and receivers using optical-phased antenna arrays [ 36 ].…”