Waferscale Silicon Photonics Systems: A Cost-Benefit Analysis and Optimization

This work compares silicon photonic and electrical interconnects for tile-based waferscale systems. It examines how application behavior, network topology, waveguide design, and reconfigurability affect performance, power, and area.

The benefits depend on the workload and largely come from reduced communication latency. Some highly connected designs exceed microring resonator power limits. Custom waveguide networks reduce these overheads and make a broader range of topologies feasible.

Authors: Robert Bao, Zongrui Cai, Shuangliang Chen, Ajay Joshi, Darius Bunandar, and Rakesh Kumar. Robert Bao and Zongrui Cai contributed equally.