Electro-Optics - Applied Optics Fundamentals and Device Applications - page 6

GaAIAs laser Modulator

RF power IN

Low noise amplifier

Optical
fibers

Photodiode GaAs MMICs

FIGURE 2.1
Optical signal distribution network for MMIC module RF signals.

by the need for faster computing systems have pushed the requirements on
various levels of interconnects to the edge of what is possible with conven-
tional electrical interconnects. The first trend is the development of higher
speed and denser switching devices in silicon and GaAs. Switching speeds
of logic devices are now exceeding 1 Gb/s, and high-density integration has
resulted in the need for interconnect technologies to handle hundreds of
output pins. The second trend is the development of new architectures for
increasing parallelism, and hence throughput, of computing systems.
A representation of processor and interconnect complexity for present and
proposed computing architectures [6] is shown in Figure 2.2.
The dimension along the axis is the number of processors required for
various architectures. On the left side is the Von Neumann architecture

Increasing interconnect complexity

Coarse Fine

Cosmic cube DADO Neural networks

P = 10 6

Conventional
Von Neumann

P = 2-4 P = 256 Massively

parallel

Cray/CDC MIMD machine

butterfly

Connection machine

Increasing processor complexity

FIGURE 2.2
Processor versus interconnect complexity.