Optical interconnect and memory technologies for next generation computing

We demonstrate recent advances in the area of optical RAM-based cache memory technology and in the area of optical interconnect technologies for allowing the deployment of a disintegrated computational setting where off-chip optical cache modules can be connected to cache-light Chip Multiprocessors and DRAM modules. We report on recent experimental results obtained within the FP7 project RAMPLAS and we discuss the disintegration roadmap relying on optical PCB technologies and Si-integrated AWGR and transceiver chips pursued within the recently started project ICT-STREAMS. Finally, we demonstrate the application of optical memory setups in routing applications by proposing optical CAM memories towards the implementation of complete ultra-fast routing look-up tables directly in the optical domain.