Reconfigurable Optical Wireless Switches for On-Chip Interconnection

Abstract

Optical Wireless Networks on-Chip have been recently proposed as alternative paradigm to overcome the communication bottleneck in computing architectures based on electrical networks. In this paper, we propose the design of a 3×3 switching matrix for optical wireless on-chip interconnection. The design exploits integrated optical phased arrays to guarantee the communication among three transmitters and three receivers. In this work, the effect of multipath propagation in the on-chip multi-layer structure is taken into account, and the impact of the cladding layer thickness is evaluated. The proposed device is intended to interconnect multiple nodes assuring reconfigurability and high bandwidth.