Method and apparatus for distributing an optical clock in an int

Details Method and apparatus for distributing an optical clock in an int Method and apparatus for distributing an optical clock in an int

1998-05-14

1999-03-30

Healy, Brian

Optical waveguides

Integrated optical circuit

385 24, 385 31, 25022711, 327291, 327293, G02B 612, G01J 104, H04B 1012

Patent

active

058899030

ABSTRACT:
A method and an apparatus for optically clocking an integrated circuit in a semiconductor. In one embodiment, a laser is configured to emit infrared laser pulses at a desired clock frequency. The laser pulses are separated into a plurality of split laser pulses, each of which are focused through the back side of a C4 packaged integrated circuit die into P-N junctions distributed throughout the integrated circuit die. Each P-N junction locally generates a photocurrent in response to the split laser beams. Each of the photocurrents are locally converted into voltages and thus into local clock signals, which are used to clock the local area of the integrated circuit. With the presently described optical clocking technique, the local clock signals have extremely low clock skew. The presently described technique may be employed in integrated circuits system-wide, in multi-chip modules, or in an individual integrated circuit. By removing the global clock distribution network from the silicon, the present invention allows chip area used in the prior art for a global clock distribution networks to be used instead for signal routing or allows overall die sizes to be reduced.

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