Switching in photonic interconnection networks

Photonic interconnection networks based on silicon photonic technology have the potential to alleviate some of the communication and computation bottlenecks that are currently hindering performance and scalability. By concatenating small-scale silicon photonic building blocks into larger subcomponents, combined with monolithic integration with advanced CMOS electronics, we can create versatile photonic switch matrices, as well as other switching fabrics. The switch matrices may be used to form high-radix photonic core and even edge switches to optically interconnect data center server racks, as well as every level of the high-performance computing system network hierarchy, on and off chip.