Scope of the Workshop

Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) is becoming the standard for high-performance computing systems. The performance of an MPSoC is determined not only by the performance of its processing cores and memories, but also by how efficiently they collaborate with one another. As the technology advances and allows the integration of many processing cores, metallic interconnects in MPSoCs will consume significant power while imposing high latency and low bandwidth. Shifting to the many-core era necessitates considering an alternative interconnect technology to replace the traditional electrical interconnects. Among such technologies, photonic technology has demonstrated promising potentials to address the aforementioned issues with the metallic interconnects in MPSoCs. In this context, high-performance silicon photonic devices and circuits are necessary to construct photonic interconnect networks. Furthermore, it is required to explore the feasibility and performance of photonic interconnects as well as the guidelines and design requirements to realize such interconnects. OPTICS aims at discussing the most recent advances in photonic interconnects and silicon photonics for computing systems. Industry's and academia's views on the feasibility and recent progress of optical interconnects and silicon photonics will be discussed. The workshop is comprised of invited talks of the highest caliber in addition to refereed poster presentations.

Topics to be discussed in the workshop include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Design Methodologies, Modeling and Tools: design space exploration, optimization, thermal-aware design, floor-planning, system-level modeling and simulation, etc.
• Architectures/Micro-Architectures: hybrid optical-electronic interconnects, passive/active-based optical switches networks, communication protocols, etc.
• Applications: high-performance computing, photonics interconnect for memory and many-core systems, etc.
• Silicon Photonics Devices and Circuits: circuit demonstrators, on-chip lasers, photodetectors, electro-optic modulators, optical/photonic switches and routers, athermal devices, high-bandwidth I/O, etc.

You are invited to participate and submit your contributions to OPTICS. Papers should be in the standard IEEE 2-column conference format, and they should not exceed four pages in length, including all the figures, tables, and references. Your paper need to be submitted at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=optics2016 before the submission deadline (see below). Please select the "Short-Paper (Author)" under topics. This workshop does not require blind submissions. All submissions will undergo a peer-review process. If your paper is accepted, you will need to prepare a poster and present it at the workshop. Informal proceedings with the accepted papers will be made available at the end of the workshop. The papers presented at the DATE workshops are NOT disseminated through the official DATE proceedings or through any other formal channels, such as, for example, the IEEExplore or the ACM Digital Library.

The authors of the best-ranked papers will be invited to contribute a chapter to a book titled " Optical Interconnects for Computing Systems" that will be published by River Publishers (Confirmed).

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 15^th November 2015 1^st December 2015

Acceptance notification: 5^th December 2015 15^th December 2015

Camera ready: 1^st February 2016