Optical versus electrical interconnections for clock distribution networks in new VLSI technologies

Interconnects constitute a severe impediment to the future progress of VLSI integrated systems technology. The use of optics is considered to be an alternative solution that could overcome the limitations of metallic interconnects. Clock distribution networks could particularly benefit from this technology. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of the performance gains of using optical interconnect for clock distribution in terms of power and frequency. We present detailed comparative simulations of the features of optical and electrical H-tree clock networks.