
19.8 FUTURE DIRECTIONS: OPTICAL
INTERCONNECTION NETWORKS-ON-CHIP
Looking forward to the future opportunities for OINs, the emerging field of
networks-on-chip (NoC) for multicore processors may significantly benefit from
the insertion of photonic interconnect technologies. The last few years have seen
remarkable advances in the integration of photonic elements in silicon with critical
components such as modulators, waveguides, and optical receive rs (based
on SiGe) now available as library cells in standard CMOS processes [20, 57–61].
Concurrently with these advances in integrated silicon photonics, as discussed in
Section 19.1, microprocessors are