Reflective optical ring-array interconnects: an optical system design study.

We present a reflective optical ring-array interconnect architecture for handling data routings under various single-instruction-multiple-data array processing environments. The proposed architecture can perform clock-skew-free optical data communications for either a fixed-degree model, such as a nearest-neighbor network, or a variable-degree model, such as a plus-minus-2(i) network. It is found that space-variant routings, which are difficult to perform in a rectangular-array opto-electronic integrated circuit, can easily be mapped into rotation-invariant routines for optical implementation by a ring opto-electronic integrated-circuit array. Our system study also shows that the design of the optical imaging system for interconnecting a ring array of nodes is much easier than that for interconnecting a conventional rectangular-array topology. Design principles for both the individual optical components and the entire optical system are described. The optical network performance parameters, such as the diffraction- and aberration-related processing capabilities, the optical transmitter coupling efficiency, the optical free-space power distribution loss, and the power-dependent element bit rate, are analyzed.