On-chip optical interconnects versus electrical interconnects for high-performance applications

In this paper, four types of on-chip point-to-point communication links are optimized for low energy per bit at sufficient bandwidth density for use in high performance applications: on-chip optical interconnect links with off-chip and with on-chip lasers, electrical full-swing RC links and electrical transmission line (TL) links. System requirements and interconnect link performance are evaluated based on the ITRS scaling roadmap. A benchmark of the link performance against system requirements indicates that full-swing RC interconnect suffices down to 12 nm. Both TL and optical interconnect can provide low-latency communication with sufficient bandwidth density and sufficiently low energy per bit until the end of the roadmap. For the system scenario studied in this work, there is no evident need to switch to the optical option.