Low Power Hybrid Optical Driver and Receiver Circuits for Optical Interconnect Experimentation.

While there has been much discussion in the literature regarding optical interconnects within future generations of large-scale computer systems, little experimental work exists investigating a functional optical interconnect within an advanced VLSI environment. Yet it is clear that the critical issue in making the trade- off between optical and electrical links is the actual total performance of the optical interconnects in a given architecture. The concept of Hybrid Wafer-Scale Integrated computer architectures is based on both silicon-on-silicon and WSI technology and provides an excellent environment for the study of optical interconnects within future systems. From experimentation with optical interconnects composed partly of hybrid mounted device die, reasonable performance assumptions can be drawn about the corresponding future monolithic devices. This paper describes a low power, hybrid LED driver and p-i-n photodiode receiver circuit with ECL inputs and outputs for this purpose.