Optical dielectric rod antenna for on-chip communications

Recent advances in micro-fabrication technologies have enabled an exponential increase in the density of on-chip components. Many-core chips are expected to be the main stream of future central processing units (CPUs). Dual- and quad-core CPUs are already available; however, if additional cores are integrated on a single chip, the low power efficiency and high signal latency appear as serious issues. Traditional core-to-core communication is enabled using copper wires. As more cores are integrated, the sizes of metallic interconnects shrink, while the network complexity increases. As a result, the power losses in the interconnection network are considerably higher. It is estimated that a 256-core CPU will have power loss in excess of 150W [1]. Due to this large network loss, the cores in a many-core system must also serve as signal repeaters before passing on signals. In this case, the signal latency is dramatically increased, since data packets may require many hops to find their destinations.