Abstract
Summary form only given. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. This tutorial aims to provide a comprehensive overview of silicon nanophotonics for future manycore chip architectures. The first part of the tutorial will educate the audience on the basics of silicon nanophotonics technology as well as the state-of-the-art in silicon nanophotonic fabrication and prototyping from industry and academia. Next, the challenges related to reliability, energy consumption, performance, and thermal stability of silicon photonics building blocks will be discussed. Subsequently, device-level, circuit-level, and architecture-level solutions will be comprehensively surveyed and presented, where the goal is to overcome the key challenges to the low cost integration of silicon nanophotonic interconnects at the chip-scale. Lastly, cross-layer solutions that combine techniques at the device, circuit, architecture, and/or system levels will be presented. Such solutions represent a very promising approach to achieving fault tolerance, energy efficiency, high performance, and thermal stability with much lower overheads than traditional single layer solutions. The tutorial will conclude with a discussion of open challenges and research problems in the area of silicon nanophotonics. The target audience for this tutorial is quite broad, from students of VLSI design who want to learn about this exciting area, to researchers and industry practitioners who want to get an updated view of recent developments in the area.