Channel routing for integrated optics

Abstract

Abstract-Increasing scope and applications of integrated optics necessitates the development of automated techniques for physical design of optical systems. This paper presents an automated, planar channel routing technique for integrated optical waveguides. Integrated optics is a planar technology and lacks the inherent signal restoration capabilities of static-CMOS. Therefore, signal loss minimization-as a function of waveguide crossings and bends-is the primary objective of this technique. This is in contrast to track and wire-length minimization of traditional VLSI routing. Our optical channel router guarantees minimal waveguide crossings by drawing upon sorting-based techniques for waveguide routing. To further improve our solutions in terms of signal loss, we extend the router to reduce the number of bends produced during routing. Finally, we implement the optical channel routing technique and describe the experimental results, comparing the costs of routing solutions with respect to waveguide crossings, bends, and channel height.

Contrasting Laser Power Requirements of Wavelength-Routed Optical NoC Topologies Subject to the Floorplanning, Placement, and Routing Constraints of a 3-D-Stacked System

“…1) They focus on optical routing geometries, thus failing to capture the topologic level [20], [21]. 2) They tackle the P&R challenge mainly for physically distributed [27] or ring-equivalent structures [23], while centralized topologies are trivially placed in the middle of the die [29].…”

“…For each communication that needs to be implemented in the ring (loop in line 5 of the pseudocode), the algorithm first tries to set the connection on the minimal path between the two nodes reusing a wavelength already present in the design (lines 8-16). If that is not possible because some of the required ring sections are not free in any waveguide with any of the existing wavelengths, a new wavelength will be added to set the communication (lines [19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. If the maximum number of wavelengths had already been reached, then the algorithm will try to set the communication on the nonminimal path, going around the ring in the other direction (lines 28-36).…”