The application of optical interconnection for computer system

In this paper, some recent achievements of optical interconnection network in Tianjin University are overviewed. These works are divided into two categories: One is demonstration of optical interconnection network for massively parallel processing systems. An opto-electronic hybrid parallel processing system with 64 processors, which are interconnected by optical fiber links, have been designed. Another is optical interconnection technique for computer clusters. A giga-bit/s optical links, hardware-routing has optical rings and wavelength-routing dual rings have been realized. Meanwhile, the communication latency has been reduced to 200 ns adopting hardware-routing technique. To further reduce the data packet routing-latency, wavelength routing technique has been implemented in a dual-wavelength ring. A star-ring combined network based on MEMS optical switch was realized, it demonstrated that, using MEMS optical switch in the network could be un-sensitive for data throughput of communication.