Power and scalability analysis of multi-plane optical interconnection networks

Abstract

The scalability of current electrical interconnection networks will be soon limited by their power consumption and dissipation. To overcome such an issue, multi-plane optical interconnection networks have been proposed. Multi-plane networks are composed of a number of cards, each of them supporting a number of ports, interconnected through a passive optical backplane. Two switching domains are envisioned to be exploited allowing for flexible switching of data packets across all ports and cards. This study considers three different implementations that are representative of the multi-plane optical interconnection networks based on space and wavelength switching. The implementations differ from each other in the switching domain used. The aim of the work is to investigate the power consumption and scalability of the three implementations, based on state-of-the-art 40 Gb/s technology. The physical layer analysis and the power consumption assessment including both electronic and optical components indicate that the implementation can impact on the scalability as well as the power consumption. The arrayed waveguide gratings (AWG)-based implementation is found to suffer from scalability and power consumption issues. On the other hand, an implementation based on active switches shows an energy efficiency similar to the coupler-based implementation, but a four-fold scalability increase

A Silicon Microring Optical 2 $\times$ 2 Switch Exploiting Orbital Angular Momentum for Interconnection Networks up to 20 Gbaud

“…1. The scheme origins from a previous architecture not exploiting the OAM as switching domain [24], where N independent line cards each one with M input/output ports (p1,…,pM) are interconnected. Here we propose to implement the switching among the ports in the wavelength domain, i.e.…”

“…the destination port is determined by the wavelength of the transmitted signal, while the switching among the cards is implemented in the OAM domain. More specifically, while in [6][7][8]24] the destination card is addressed through an optical space switch, in this work the destination card is selected by a different OAM mode for each signal coming from one of the card input ports. The selected OAM mode unambiguously determines the destination card, independently of the signal wavelength.…”

Interconnection network architectures based on integrated orbital angular momentum emitters

“…An effective solution to overcome these issues is represented by optical interconnection networks based on optical switching [3]. By exploiting simultaneously different switching domains, a further enhancing of scalability and total capacity can be obtained [4]. The orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light can be exploited as further switching domain, together with the more traditional domains as e.g.…”

Two-layer interconnection network architectures based on integrated concentric orbital angular momentum emitters

“…An effective solution to overcome these issues is represented by optical interconnection networks based on optical switching [2]. By exploiting simultaneously different multiplexing domains, further enhancing of the scalability and the total capacity can be obtained [3]. A two-layer orbital angular momentum (OAM) and wavelength based switch architecture has been presented in [4], based on a single and not tunable OAM emitter with multiple superimposed gratings.…”