An optical clock distribution network for gigascale integration

Abstract

A novel system-level model describing a printed wiring board-level, high-fanout, curved aperture optical waveguide H-tree network using volume grating focusing couplers is presented. The intra-chip optical network globally distributes an optical signal to monolithic CMOS receivers for local clock distribution. An estimation for the available optical output power as a function of distribution fanout is presented. Assuming -2 dB optical loss per y-junction, a distribution fanout of 256 can be achieved for an optical input power of 1.23 W.