A MIMO-Inspired Rapidly Switchable Photonic Interconnect Architecture (Postprint)

It is well-known that interconnect issues pose a significant bottleneck with regard to improving the performance of high-speed integrated systems such as a cluster of computer processing units. Power, speed bandwidth, and size all affect the computational performance and capabilities of future systems. High speed optical processing has been looked to as a means for eliminating this interconnect bottleneck. Presented here are the results of a study for a novel optical integrated photonic processor which would allow for a high-speed, secure means for arbitrarily addressing a multiprocessor system. This paper will present analysis, simulation, and optimization results for the architecture as well as considerations for a proof-of-concept level system design. The architecture takes advantage of spatial and wavelength diversity and in this regard may be regarded as a Multiple Input Multiple Output MIMO architecture.