Firehose Architectures for Free-Space Optically Interconnected VLSI Circuits
✍ Scribed by Ashok V. Krishnamoorthy; David A.B. Miller
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 220 KB
- Volume
- 41
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0743-7315
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✦ Synopsis
Free-space optical interconnects will soon be able to provide input/output bandwidths to a VLSI chip in excess of a terabit per second. The successful application of this technology to parallel distributed processing systems depends on the development of high-bandwidth interconnects and the ability of the architecture to sustain a stream of data at these bandwidths to the processing elements. We review examples of computational tasks that require scalable input/output, that is, computations where the I/O bandwidth of a processing element must grow in proportion to its computational bandwidth. We present several classes of optoelectronic architectures that can support a high-bandwidth data firehose and mention applications in switching, FFT, sorting, matrix-vector processing, database search, and processorto-memory interconnect.