Reconfigurable Nanophotonic Optical Interconnects for Advanced FPGAs

Optically interconnected systems provide a number of additional benefits. For example, by removing metallic traces, many signal integrity issues are also eliminated as the parasitic capacitance and inductance associated with high-speed lines are removed, which further improves systems performance. Additionally, such systems typically require less power and experience less leakage, or wasted power, which is critical in space-borne applications. Moreover, an optical system is immune to the standard radiation effects of the harsh space environment. To this end, we propose the development of an optically reconfigurable nanophotonic interconnect for advanced FPGA. By removing the electrical interconnections between logic blocks, data can be quickly and efficiently routed across the FPGA. Such a novel design will remove the routing bottleneck associated with existing FPGA architectures and enable the rapid development of high performance FPGA systems.