links to provide the same communication performance, they do not completely
alleviate the power dissipation problem. Power dissipation has been identified as a
key limitation to improving the performance in intrachip communications as a
growing fraction of the total power dissipated in VLSI chip is expended on
communications rather than computation.
Photonic channels can support large amounts of data traffic across longer
distances in a bandwidth-oriented design of a network connec ting processing
cores and memories. The communications can occur at very high throughput s
with extraordinary ener gy efficiencies compared with equivalent electronic tech-
nologies. In a field that was dominated for decades by a race for performance,
performance-per-unit-pow ...