Superconducting Technology Assessment - nitrd

3.5 DEVELOPMENTS FOR LOW TEMPERATURE OPTO-ELECTRONIC COMPONENTS
With the exception of InP HEMT amplifiers, which have been used at low temperatures, optical and opto-electronic
components which are made to operate at an intermediate temperature are generally not available off-the-shelf.
In addition, all the current development efforts are aimed at room temperature use. There do not appear to be any
fundamental issues which would preclude the necessary developments; the initial phases of the effort should focus
on identifying those areas which require adaptation of standard room temperature optical and opto-electronic
technologies for use at low temperatures.
4. CONCLUSIONS
Given the efforts outlined briefly above, optical interconnect technology capable of handling the 50 Gbps data
rates and overall data transmission requirements for a superconductive petaflop computer can be made available
by 2010. Commercially available telecommunications technology is now at 40-43 Gbps per single data stream;
commercial off-the-shelf optical interconnect technology is currently at 2.5 Gbps. Efforts to increase these rates
substantially, and reduce cost, size and power consumption are ongoing under a DARPA program with company
cost sharing. These programs will provide advances in the near future; however, the more advanced and specialized
requirements of a superconductive supercomputer will require additional government funding to meet the 2010
time line, as well as to provide components suitable for the cryogenic environment in which many of them
must operate.
The key issues to be addressed are the following:
■ Developing device structures capable of 50 Gbps operation in highly integrable formats.
■ Reduction of electrical power requirements of large numbers of electro-optical components
operating at cryogenic temperatures.
■ Packaging and integration of these components to reduce the size and ease the assembly
of a system of the scale of a petaflops supercomputer.
■ Reducing the cost of these components by large scale integration and simple and rapid
manufacturing techniques.
Table 1 is a summary of the developments required to fully develop the optical interconnect components needed
to begin construction of a superconductive supercomputer by 2010.
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