Superconducting Technology Assessment - nitrd

Univ. of Colorado
Univ. of Texas at Austin
Univ. of California at Santa Barbara
TABLE 5-2. ACADEMIC ACTIVITY
5.1.2 OPTICAL INTERCONNECT TECHNOLOGY – READINESS
Plan to build an array of 40 Gbps directly modulated VCSELs;
has already achieved 10 Gbps and expect to reach 20 Gbps in
the near future.
Working on amplifierless receivers crucial for 4 K applications.
Working on amplifierless receivers crucial for 4 K applications.
All of these efforts are aimed at achieving devices and systems that will be practical for use in the near
future in terms of cost and power consumption as well as performance.
Although optical interconnects have been introduced in large-scale systems, some technical issues must be resolved
for the use of optical interconnects in a superconducting computer:
■ The cryogenic operation of optical components must be determined; all the current
development efforts are aimed at room temperature use with only minimal R&D effort
for use at cryogenic temperatures. There do not appear to be any fundamental issues
which would preclude the necessary developments.
■ Even with cryogenic operation, some optical components may dissipate too much power
at the required data rates to be useful in a petaflops-scale system. However, Figure 5.2
shows that low power is achievable at significant data rates for many optical components.
Figure 5-2. Four channel transceiver arrays operating at 10 Gbps/channel produced by IBM/Agilent. Total power consumption for 4 channels
is less than 3 mW/Gbps.
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