Optoelectronic FPGA's

For several years, optics and photonics have been demonstrating their super iority over electronics in high-bandwidth, long-distance interconnect. Spur red by the advancing state of photonics technology, the level in the system hierarchy at which optical interconnect provides clear advantages over ele ctrical interconnect appears to become distinctly lower as time moves on. I n this paper, we focus on the use of optical logic-level interchip intercon nect. While, in general the advantages of optical interconnect at such low hierarchical levels currently are at best doubtful, there appear to exist i mportant subclasses of components or systems where such advantages are much more tangible. We identify field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) as a clas s of general-purpose very large scale integration components that would dem onstrably benefit from the massive introduction of state-of-the-art optical interchip interconnections at the logic level. In this paper, we first ide ntify the underlying reasons why we think that FPGA's form an exception to the general rule, and hence, why optical interconnects provide added value. We then briefly discuss some architectural issues to be resolved when buil ding optoelectronic FPCA's, and present some of the ongoing work on the mod eling of optoelectronic multi-FPGA systems.