LARGE-SCALE INTEGRATED PHOTONICS FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE INTERCONNECTS

Over the next decade, the computational performance expectations set by the information technology industry will require an entirely new approach to interconnect architectures and implementations. Commercial computational and data bandwidth requirements are expected to reach the petaflop/second range (and perhaps as high as an exaflop/second), and the physics of copper wire interconnects will not be able to scale to meet this demand. Widespread adoption of photonic integrated circuits for communication over distance scales of 1 mm–100 m could establish the foundations of a highly scalable and cost-effective "Moore's Law" for information bandwidth at all levels of granularity from the chip to the enterprise in computer systems. In this talk I will describe three integrated optical technologies that could help bring the full benefit of modern photonics to commercial computer systems.

Dr. Ray Beausoleil is an HP Fellow in the Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory (IQSL) at HP Laboratories. There he leads the Large-Scale Integrated Photonics research group, and is responsible for research on the applications of optics at the micro/nanoscale to high-performance classical and quantum information processing. In 1996, Ray became a member of the technical staff at HP Laboratories, after serving as an officer or director of R&D at three small companies in the laser and computer industries. Among his other accomplishments at HP, he invented the optical paper-navigation algorithms incorporated into the HP/Agilent optical mouse, and now HP's large-format printers. Ray received the Bachelor of Science with Honors in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1980; the Master of Science degree in Physics from Stanford University in 1984; and his Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford in 1986 as a member of Ted Hansch's research group.