Reconfigurable photonic switching: Towards all-optical FPGAs

FPGA performance is limited by transistor switching time and power dissipation defined by the CMOS technology. Similarly to the case of interconnects, silicon photonics can also be leveraged to replace traditional, slow and power consuming, electrical computing circuits. In this paper we propose an all Optical LUT, an optical core implementation of LUT, which has the potential for low latency and relatively low power computation. The OLUT unique feature is its compliant input and output optical interfaces, which allows assembly to realize complex functions. The use of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) allows both parallel communication and computation, which can further increase the system performance. Preliminary results illustrate how the proposed OLUT can be assembled, giving the trends to the design of an all optical FPGA.