DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS AND ALGORITHMS FOR PARTITIONING OPTOELECTRONIC MULTICHIP MODULES

There is considerable interest in the development of optical interconn ects for multichip modules (MCM's) to improve their performance. For e ffective utilization of the optical and electronic technologies, a met hodology for partitioning the system is required. The key question to be answered is which technology should be used for each interconnect i n a given netlist: optical or electronic. We introduce the computer-ai ded design approach for partitioning optoelectronic systems into optoe lectronic MCM's. We first discuss the design trade-off issues in an op toelectronic system design, including speed, power dissipation, area, and diffraction limits for free-space optics. We then define a formula tion for optoelectronic MCM partitioning and describe new algorithms f or optimizing this partitioning based on the minimization of the power dissipation. The models for the algorithms are discussed in detail, a nd an example of a multistage interconnect network is given. Different results, with the number and size of chips being variable, are presen ted in which improvement for the system packaging has been observed wh en the partitioning algorithms are applied.