随着集成电路技术的发展,单个芯片上核的数目不断增加,多核将成为芯片体系架构的未来发展趋势。核间的互连成为芯片设计中的一个关键技术。传统的片上电互连在带宽、时延、能耗和可靠性等方面都面临挑战,光互连可以很好地解决这些问题。本文对现有片上光互连的集成光电子器件发展进行了综述,在此基础上研究了一个典型的多核光互连系统,对网络结构、节点组成和通信过程等逐一进行了分析。结果表明,光互连是未来多核系统的有效互连方式。
The development of integrated technology enables more and more cores to be incorporated into a single chip. Multi-core archtictures will be the main thrust driving the evolution of the chip design. Interconnects play a significant role in chip design. Traditional on-chip electrical interconnects face hard challenges in bandwidth, latency, power consumption and scalability. Optical interconnects can be a solution, increasing communication bandwidth and decreasing latency. This paper summarizes the development of current integrated opto-electrical components related to optical interconnects on chip, and studies a typical muli-core architecture with optical interconnects. The network structure, nodes architecture and process of communication are analyzed in details. Finally, the results show that optical interconnects will be the efficient approach of multi-core architectures in the future.