A Group-Based Laser Power Supply Scheme for Photonic Network on Chip

Abstract

It is expected that the future multicore systems will significantly benefit from photonic interconnect technology because of its large bandwidth. However, the static power consumed by laser sources accounts for a large proportion of the overall power budget; thus, it has a negative impact on the performance of future photonic network on chip. In this paper, GLaP, a group-based static laser power supply approach is proposed. The communication backbone is investigated based on single-write-multiread crossbar. Generic laser power delivery and allocation architectures are proposed to match the bandwidths with the requirements of different nodes. The laser sources are shared across the network which enables significant reduction in laser power consumption. The evaluation results show that the laser power can be significantly saved compared with traditional laser supply schemes.