Low-power, transparent optical network interface for high bandwidth off-chip interconnects.

Area of Science:

• Computer Engineering
• Optical Communications
• High-Performance Computing

Background:

• Multicore architectures and chip multiprocessors (CMPs) increase bandwidth demands for on-chip and off-chip interconnects.
• Scalable, power-efficient off-chip communication is critical for next-generation computing clusters.
• Power dissipation in off-chip interfaces and long-distance signal transmission is a major bottleneck.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a scalable photonic network interface approach.
• To exploit the bandwidth capacity of optical interconnects.
• To achieve significant power savings compared to traditional electro-optical (E/O) and opto-electronic (O/E) methods.

Main Methods:

• Developed a power-efficient interface for optically aggregating electronic serial data streams.
• Utilized a multiple Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) channel packet structure.
• Achieved time-of-flight latencies for data aggregation.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated a scalable optical network interface.
• Achieved a 70% improvement in power efficiency.
• Validated the performance for end-to-end PCI Express data transfer.

Conclusions:

• The proposed photonic network interface offers a scalable solution for power-efficient off-chip communication.
• Optical aggregation of data streams significantly reduces power consumption in high-performance computing systems.
• This approach addresses a key bottleneck, enabling higher computational performance.