Low latency, area, and energy efficient Hybrid Photonic Plasmonic on-chip Interconnects (HyPPI)

Abstract

In this paper we benchmark various interconnect technologies including electrical, photonic, and plasmonic options. We contrast them with hybridizations where we consider plasmonics for active manipulation devices, and photonics for passive propagation integrated circuit elements, and further propose another novel hybrid link that utilizes an on chip laser for intrinsic modulation thus bypassing electro-optic modulation. Link benchmarking proves that hybridization can overcome the shortcomings of both pure photonic and plasmonic links. We show superiority in a variety of performance parameters such as point-to-point latency, energy efficiency, capacity, ability to support wavelength division multiplexing, crosstalk coupling length, bit flow density and Capability-to-Latency-Energy-Area Ratio.