A Holistic Modeling and Analysis of Optical–Electrical Interfaces for Inter/Intra-chip Interconnects

With the fast development of inter/intra-chip optical interconnects, the gap between the data rates of electrical interconnects and optical interconnects is continuously increasing. Electrical–optical (E-O) interfaces and optical–electrical (O-E) interfaces are a pair of components that convert data between parallel electrical interconnects and serial optical interconnects. This paper holistically models and analyzes E-O and O-E interfaces in terms of energy consumption, area, and latency. Traditional interfaces, where data are converted between parallel and serial ports by serializers and deserializers (SerDes), are studied. A new type of E-O and O-E interface, which serializes and deserializes data by optical weaving technologies, are proposed alongside. Traditional interfaces will become a bottleneck for the further development of optical interconnects in the near future because of the high energy consumption and large area of SerDes necessitating new technologies. Our analysis shows that optical weaving interfaces have a better overall performance than traditional interfaces. For example, if there are 64 parallel electrical interconnects and four optical wavelengths, optical weaving interfaces can achieve a 81.6% improvement in energy consumption and a 40.8% improvement in area, compared with traditional interfaces.