Monolithic integration of CMOS and nanophotonic devices for massively parallel optical interconnects in supercomputers

Abstract

High-performance computing (HPC) systems capable of delivering Exaflops performance are envisioned to become a reality by the end of this decade. In order to provide the enormous communication bandwidth that is necessary, hundreds of millions of optical interconnects will have to be deployed to connect together racks, modules and chips. To achieve such massive level of parallelism for HPC systems, monolithic integration of deeply scaled silicon optical circuits into the front-end of standard CMOS process have been demonstrated as a promising technology [1-3]. © 2011 IEEE.