A Power Efficient and Compact Optical Interconnect for Network-on-Chip

Abstract

Optical interconnect is a promising alternative to substitute the electrical interconnect for intra-chip communications. The topology of optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC) has a great impact on the network performance. However, the size of ONoC is limited by the power consumption and crosstalk noise, which are mainly resulted from the waveguide crossings in the topology. In this paper, a diagonal Mesh topology (DMesh) is proposed to relieve the limitation of scalability by reducing the number of waveguide crossing, which is only 20% that of Mesh. In addition, the number of optical routers in DMesh is less than half of that in Mesh-based ONoC. Due to its compact architecture and favorable scalability, DMesh topology is suitable for large-scale ONoC design.