Optical versus Electrical Tradeoffs for Communications in Highly Parallel Distributed Memory Multiprocessors (NOT KNOWN IF PUBLISHED BECAUSE AUTHOR HAS LEFT AT&T)

Continued scaling of silicon CMOS technologies to smaller feature sizes will provide impressive opportunities for integration of very complex processing systems on single IC's and single wafers. This suggests a considerable scaling of "large-scale" systems such as distributed computing environments to much smaller, more highly monolithic realizations. Such "scaled-systems" will require a corresponding scale of communications networks, perhaps reduced to single wafer sized networks and switching circuits. Presently, electronic interconnections characterize monolithic circuit interconnections while optical communications is making significant inroads for efficient realization of system communications.