A Chip-Level Optical Interconnect for CPU

With the rapid growth of electronic chip’s performance, electric signal limits chip I/O in power consumption, reachability, and signal quality. In this letter, we propose a new chip-let architecture for chip-level optical interconnect. An optic I/O chip-let including an ultra-small optic transceiver and electronic components is implemented. Our analysis shows that the optical interconnect based on this architecture can achieve 1/3 power consumption and 1/2 area compared with traditional board-level optical interconnect in Ethernet NIC application. By adopting the architecture we proposed, the optic I/O chip-let can support any payload IC such as CPU, GPU, switch to have optic I/O.