Quantifying the impact of optical interconnect latency on the performance of optoelectronic FPGAs

In this paper, we address the possible advantages of using optoelectronic area-I/O to realize three-dimensional multi-FPGA architectures. Our approach is based on experimental determination of achievable clock rates when realizing synchronous designs. Our experiments indicate that three-dimensional optoelectronic multi-FPGA architectures exhibit higher performance than traditional two-dimensional electronic FPGAs, provided the optical link latency is sufficiently low. It turns out that with latencies of state of the art optical links the gains can be positive, in particular for large and complex designs.