A 3-DIMENSIONAL HIGH-THROUGHPUT ARCHITECTURE USING THROUGH-WAFER OPTICAL INTERCONNECT

This paper presents a three-dimensional, highly parallel, optically in terconnected system to process high-throughput stream data such as ima ges, The vertical optical interconnections are realized using integrat ed optoelectronic devices operating at wavelengths to which silicon is transparent. These through-wafer optical signals are used to vertical ly optically interconnect stacked silicon circuits, The thin film opto electronic devices are bonded directly to the stacked layers of silico n circuitry to realize self-contained vertical optical interconnection s. Each integrated circuit layer contains analog interface circuitry, namely, detector amplifier and emitter driver circuitry, and digital c ircuitry for the network and/or processor, all of which are fabricated using a standard silicon integrated circuit foundry, These silicon ci rcuits are post processed to integrate the thin him optoelectronics us ing standard, low cost, high yield microfabrication techniques. The th ree-dimensionally integrated architectures described herein are a netw ork and a processor. The network has been designed to meet off-chip I/ O using a new offset cube topology coupled with naming and routing sch emes, The performance of this network is comparable to that of a three -dimensional mesh, The processing architecture has been defined to min imize overhead for basic parallel operations, The system goal for this research is to develop an integrated processing node for high-through put, low-memory applications.