Nanophotonics Inteconnect - Literature Review

In this post of  JVL blog, I want to publish a small literature review in the area of Photonics Interconnects.

In partial fulfillment of one of my advanced topics course in IC (integrated circuits) Design during my current masters program, I had to write a small literature review on the topic of photonics interconnects. As it is usual for our advanced topics courses, the lecturer for this course was a guest professor from a foreign institution ( this case from UT Austin, my former alma mater). The guest lecturer was a leading expert in the area of IC Design and who is a researcher interested in nanometer VLSI physical design.

He has published few papers focusing on using nanophotonics, a fairly premature technology, as interconnects in nanometer integrated circuits. We were required to write a brief 4 pages literature review of about 4-5 papers on the topic. On the one hand, we gained some experience in reading and understanding very specific and complex scientific papers in trending research areas of IC Design. On the other hand, we were exposed to and gained practice on writing a technical paper. Although it was not required, I have done it in Latex, which is a compiled word processor very useful in any kind of write-ups. This has been proven very useful in academia.

The Literature Review

The following paper review posted here tries to summarize key concepts and my understanding of the different papers. This is in NO WAY an officially published paper nor does it contain any new contributions from my part. It serves as a technical writing exercise. As usual, leave a comment if you have one! 

And a few final words...

Although it was only a 4 pages write up, it does require a good understanding of the technically-dense and jargon-full scientific papers we had to read. And precisely because it was only 4 pages long, it was also a challenge to pack all the key points and concepts into a highly limited space and still make sense out of it.  

Although technical writing skills was heavily tested during my bachelors, reviewing such novel and complex scientific papers was not. It is worthwhile mentioning the importance of this exercise for future tasks as it paves the way for further interesting assignments...