This project will investigate the use of time-of-flight design techniques in the design of optical computers. This is a new design approach that takes advantage of the absence of capacitive and inductive effects, giving optical interconnects an advantage over electrical one in high-speed digital systems. As a result, propagation delays can be precisely controlled in optical interconnects and logic, thus mitigating problems such as clock skew. This feature of optics motivates a new method of digital design, where latches used to synchronize signals are removed. To synchronize signals at logic gates, the designer instead relies on adjustments of signal propagation delays. Clock gating is used to eliminate residual timing uncertainty which would cause phase drift in feedback loops. This new scheme eliminates latch overhead and allows deep pipelining at the gate level.
