Quantifying the Performance of Optoelectronic Fpga's: the Impact of Optical Interconnect Latency

In this chapter, we address the performance advantage of using optoelectronic areaI/O to realize three-dimensional multi-FPGA architectures. The performance of such architectures strongly depends on the latency of the optoelectronic components used. Determining the optical link latency that is required to benefit from the promised advantage is far from trivial. We present first estimates of the impact of optical interconnect latency on system performance, for a particular class of OE multiFPGA architectures. Our approach is based on experimental determination of achievable clock rates when realizing synchronous designs. Our experiments indicate that with latencies of state of the art optical links the gains can be positive. 1 University of Gent, dept. of Electronics and Information Systems, BELGIUM 2 Flanders Language Valley, BELGIUM Interconnects in VLSI Design 2