|
As discussed in the section entitled Rationale the relevance of this work is to overcome the I/O limits that will be imposed on future small-feature IC's by the use of purely electronic connections. To ensure the continued progress in IT performance, the exploitation of optics to provide the requisite high level of communication bandwidth will become essential.
The proposed 3-D free-space approach represents one of a number of possibilities. However, it is particularly attractive as, by permitting the construction of high-throughput reconfigurable interconnects, such as the crossbar switch, it could rapidly open up the construction of powerful information processing machines based on highly interconnected processor and memory blocks. This would include massively parallel systems and advanced shared/distributed memory machines. One can therefore anticipate significant impact on all those applications currently looking to exploit highly-parallel computing systems. This is an increasingly significant domain, which is becoming less of a specialised area as the available technology improves, encompassing tasks such as engineering simulations, computational science applications, real-time image processing and games/entertainment systems. Other important applications would include the provision of wide-band interconnects in distributed sensing/control systems where large amounts of data need to be communicated from node to node with minimal delay.
|