Thermal Sensing Using Micro-ring Resonators in Optical Network-on-Chip

Abstract

In this paper, we for the first time utilize the microring resonators (MRs) in optical networks-on-chip (ONoCs) to implement thermal sensing without requiring additional hardware or chip area. The challenges in accuracy and reliability that arise from fabrication-induced process variations (PVs) and device-level wavelength tuning mechanism are resolved. We quantitatively model the intrinsic thermal sensitivity of MRs with finegrained consideration of wavelength tuning mechanism. Based on it, a novel PV-tolerant thermal sensor design is proposed. By exploiting the hidden 'redundancy' in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technique, our sensor achieves accurate and efficient temperature measurement with the capability of PV tolerance. Evaluation results based on professional photonic component and circuit simulations show an average of 86.49% improvement in measurement accuracy compared to the state-ofthe-art on-chip thermal sensing approach using MRs. Our thermal sensor achieves stable performance in the ONoCs employing dense WDM with an inaccuracy of only 0.8650 K.

Attack Mitigation of Hardware Trojans for Thermal Sensing via Micro-ring Resonator in Optical NoCs

“…Compared with the traditional electric thermal sensors, MRbased type has several favorable features, such as compact size, robustness against mechanical shock, immunity to electro-magnetic interference, and well-modeled temperature dependence [15]. Though the fabrication-induced process variation (PV), as well as the device-level wavelength tuning mechanisms, will introduce the challenges on accuracy and reliability of thermal sensing via MRs [13,16,17], it is sufficient for OS to obtain the temperature distribution on chip to execute the suitable thermal-aware control for the communications of ONoCs. Specifically, [15] started to use an MR-based sensor to implement thermal sensing.…”

“…Specifically, [15] started to use an MR-based sensor to implement thermal sensing. Then, [16] and [17] firstly utilized MRs to carry out the on-chip thermal sensing with resolving the challenges in accuracy and reliability which arise from PVs and local wavelength tuning.…”

“…As no specific work flow of the thermal sensing with MR-based sensor has been provided before in previous researches of this domain [13][14][15][16][17], we present one in this section in detail for ONoC of the classical 2D-mesh topology in Figure 5. For the normal communications, generally, the optical circuit switch is applied in ONoC for routing.…”

Contention-Aware Routing for Thermal-Reliable Optical Networks-on-Chip

“…Likewise, the total communication energy consumption has two portions shown in (10), where E o payload is the energy consumed for data transmission and E e ctrl is the control overhead.…”

“…Considering the grid-type shapes of mesh and torus topologies, each tuning node has the same x or y coordinates with the source or the destination of the pair. Therefore, the method of constructing I-shaped paths can be employed segment by segment to obtain the L-and Z-shape routes (Line [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Due to the extra loop links between boundary routers in tori, there could be two directions when conducting XTraverse() and YTraverse(), while there is only one direction in meshes.…”