Abstract
Optical RAM appears to be the alternative approach towards overcoming the “Memory
Wall” of electronics, suggesting use of light in RAM architectures to enable ps-regime
memory access times. In this communication we take advantage of the wavelength
properties of optical signals to present new architectural perspectives in optical RAM
structures by introducing the WDM principles in the storage area. To this end, we report
on a 4×4 WDM optical RAM bank architecture that exploits a novel SOA-based
multi-wavelength Access Gate (WDM-AG) and a dual wavelength SOA-based SET-RESET
All-Optical Flip Flop (AOFF) as fundamental building blocks. The WDM-AG enables
simultaneous random access to a 4-bit optical word encoded in 8 different wavelengths,
allowing for the four AOFFs of each RAM row to effectively share the same Access Gate.
The scheme is shown to support a 10 Gbit/s operation for the incoming 4-bit data
streams, with a power consumption of 15 mW/Gbit/s for the WDM-AG and 120 mW/Gbit/s for
the AOFFs. The proposed optical RAM architecture reveals that exploiting the WDM
capabilities of optical components can lead to RAM bank implementations with smarter
column/row encoders/decoders, increased circuit simplicity, reduced number of active
elements and associated power consumption, while enabling for re-configurability in
optical cache mapping.
© 2012 IEEE
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