Traditional silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform based on-chip photonic interconnects have limited energy-bandwidth scalability due to the optical non-linearity induced power constraints of the constituent photonic devices. In this paper, we propose to break this scalability barrier using a new silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) based photonic device platform. Our physical-layer characterization results show that SOS-based photonic devices have negligible optical non-linearity effects in the mid-infrared region near 4{\mu}m, which drastically alleviates their power constraints. Our link-level analysis shows that SOS-based photonic devices can be used to realize photonic links with aggregated data rate of more than 1 Tb/s, which recently has been deemed unattainable for the SOI-based photonic on-chip links. We also show that such high-throughput SOS-based photonic links can significantly improve the energy-efficiency of on-chip photonic communication architectures. Our system-level analysis results position SOS-based photonic interconnects to pave the way for realizing ultra-low-energy (< 1 pJ/bit) on-chip data transfers.

中文翻译：

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重新设计具有用于超低能耗片上通信的蓝宝石硅器件平台的光子互连

由于组成光子器件的光学非线性引起的功率限制，基于片上光子互连的传统绝缘体上硅 (SOI) 平台具有有限的能量带宽可扩展性。在本文中，我们建议使用一种新的基于蓝宝石硅 (SOS) 的光子器件平台来打破这种可扩展性障碍。我们的物理层表征结果表明，基于 SOS 的光子器件在 4{\mu}m 附近的中红外区域具有可忽略不计的光学非线性效应，这大大减轻了它们的功率限制。我们的链路级分析表明，基于 SOS 的光子器件可用于实现聚合数据速率超过 1 Tb/s 的光子链路，这在最近被认为是基于 SOI 的片上光子链路无法实现的。我们还表明，这种基于 SOS 的高吞吐量光子链路可以显着提高片上光子通信架构的能效。我们的系统级分析结果定位了基于 SOS 的光子互连，为实现超低能量 (< 1 pJ/bit) 片上数据传输铺平了道路。