A Fully Optical Ring Network-on-Chip with Static and Dynamic Wavelength Allocation

Abstract

SUMMARYSilicon photonics Network-on-Chips (NoCs) have emerged as an attractive solution to alleviate the high power consumption of traditional electronic interconnects. In this paper, we propose a fully optical ring NoC that combines static and dynamic wavelength allocation communication mechanisms. A different wavelength-channel is statically allocated to each destination node for light weight communication. Contention of simultaneous communication requests from multiple source nodes to the destination is solved by a token based arbitration for the particular wavelength-channel. For heavy load communication, a multiwavelength-channel is available by requesting it in execution time from source node to a special node that manages dynamic allocation of the shared multiwavelength-channel among all nodes. We combine these static and dynamic communication mechanisms in a same network that introduces selection techniques based on message size and congestion information. Using a photonic NoC simulator based on Phoenixsim, we evaluate our architecture under uniform random, neighbor, and hotspot traffic patterns. Simulation results show that our proposed fully optical ring NoC presents a good performance by utilizing adequate static and dynamic channels based on the selection techniques. We also show that our architecture can reduce by more than half, the energy consumption necessary for arbitration compared to hybrid photonic ring and mesh NoCs. A comparison with several previous works in term of architecture hardware cost shows that our architecture can be an attractive cost-performance efficient interconnection infrastructure for future SoCs and CMPs. key words: Network-on-Chip, high-bandwidth and low power network, optical interconnect, wavelength allocation

Panzer: A 6 × 6 photonic router for optical network on chip

“…We implement a nearest neighbor communication pattern [1], in which nodes communicate with their neighboring using different nearest neighbor rate (NNR). NNR indicates the probability that network traffic generates between cores in the same node.…”

“…Optical network on chip (ONoC), which capitalizes on the benefits of optical interconnection, such as large channel capacity, high data transfer rate and fundamentally low energy consumption [1], has been proposed as a promising alternative to metallic interconnection for giga-scale multiprocessor system on chip (MPSoC). As the key component for ONoC, optical router [2] has the basic function of routing the signals from input ports to specific output ports.…”

Waffle: A New Photonic Plasmonic Router for Optical Network on Chip

“…Taking the superiorities of optical interconnect, Optical Network on Chip (ONoC) has been illustrated as a promising solution compared with metallic interconnection for gigascale multiprocessor system on chip (MPSoC) owing to its large channel capacity, high data transfer rate and radically low energy consumption [1]. As an essential element in ONoC, optical router [2] possesses the basic function of directing the optical signals.…”

Universal method for designing non-blocking multicast-supported on chip optical router

“…Compared with electronically-connected Network-on-Chip (NoC), ONoCs possess larger communication bandwidth, lower transmission latency and lower power consumption [1]. Fully ONoC with passive routing algorithm has been proposed as the trend of future NoC [2]. Most of the previously reported optical routers [3,4,5,6,7] use only one of the resonant wavelengths of the MRs and cannot support non-blocking multicast communication.…”