High-speed (2.5 Gbps) reconfigurable inter-chip optical interconnects using opto-VLSI processors

Abstract

Reconfigurablele optical interconnects enable flexible and high-performance communication in multi-chip architectures to be arbitrarily adapted, leading to efficient parallel signal processing. The use of Opto-VLSI processors as beam steerers and multicasters for reconfigurable interchip optical interconnection is discussed. We demonstrate, as proof-of-concept, 2.5 Gbps reconfigurable optical interconnects between an 850nm vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL) array and a photodiode (PD) array integrated onto a PCB by driving two Opto-VLSI processors with steering and multicasting digital phase holograms. The architecture is experimentally demonstrated through three scenarios showing its flexibility to perform single, multicasting, and parallel reconfigurable optical interconnects. To our knowledge, this is the first reported high-speed reconfigurable N-to-N optical interconnects architecture, which will have a significant impact on the flexibility and efficiency of large shared-memory multiprocessor machines.