Investigating thermal dependence on monolithically-integrated photonic interconnects

Abstract

Monolithically-integrated optical link is a disruptive technology which has the promising potential to remove memory bandwidth bottleneck in the deep multicore regime. Although with the advantages of high bandwidth-density and energy-efficiency, it comes with design challenges from device, architecture and system perspectives. High thermal sensitivity of the essential optical ring resonator imposes constraints on the applicability of optical links in the electro-optical systems. To investigate the thermal dynamics as well as to develop advanced ring thermal-tuning mechanisms, real-time thermal monitoring at design stage is required. In this work we propose a thermal simulation platform which integrates system modeling aspects including the high-level architectural performance model, the physical device evaluation model, and the thermal analysis model. By introducing the compact thermal model with linear transient thermal analysis solver, system thermal dynamics can be monitored at high efficiency. We demonstrate the temperature profile of a multi-core microprocessor system running real workloads. The evaluation results show the system thermal dependence on the manufacturing process, circuit thermal crosstalk and integrated ring heater efficiency.