Challenges for photonics in future systems

As the physical scaling of transistors comes to an end, new approaches are needed to ensure continued enhancement in system performance. Photonics is uniquely positioned to enable innovative distributed architectures of otherwise all electronic systems. Optical interconnects are, in principle, capable of solving the wiring and IO bottlenecks of CMOS circuitry. Incorporating the advantages of photonics with the integration capability of scaled CMOS electronics leads to a new microprocessor design-point in which an encapsulated processor is defined as a single CMOS chip with optical ports as the only means of external high-speed data communication.