Low-power photonic interconnects for data centres

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The growth of video sharing over the Internet is forecast to represent 50 percent of all traffic by 2012 (Cisco Systems Inc.). High performance data centres such as high-speed routers and storage networks are expected to support this increase in bandwidth as the speed of processors increases. However, the full computational potential of processors is becoming difficult to achieve in data centres. Electrical data buses between interconnected processors and shared memory are bandwidth limited and exhibit high losses as the data rate increases. Consequently, the power dissipation of off-chip data communication is significant. In fact, today's data communication is responsible for 0.5% of carbon dioxide emissions globally (2007 Gartner Group estimation). In the future, this power dissipation will be limiting the performance scalability of data centres. To address this limitation, the investigator is proposing a research program in the area of low-power photonic interconnects for data centres.