Rejuvenate Post-Moore’s Law Computing with Photonics-Electronics Hybrid Systems

Computing systems, from HPC and data center to automobile, aircraft, and cellphone, are integrating growing numbers of processors, accelerators, memories, and peripherals to meet the burgeoning performance requirements of new applications under tight cost, energy, thermal, space, and weight constraints. Silicon photonics technologies piggyback onto developed silicon fabrication processes to provide viable and cost-effective solutions. A large number of silicon photonics devices and circuits have been demonstrated in CMOS-compatible fabrication processes. Silicon photonics technologies open up both new opportunities and new challenges to applications, architectures, design techniques, and design automation tools for hybrid photonicselectronics information systems. In the way of reaching perfect computing systems with silicon photonics, this paper tries to address three fundamental problems, including how computing systems could benefit from silicon photonics technologies, what technologies are required, and what the major challenges are.