A thermally-resilient all-optical network-on-chip

Abstract

Optical networks-on-chip are introduced as an alternative for electrical interconnects in many-core systems, due to their low delay and power consumptions, as well as their high bandwidths. Despite these advantages, physical characteristics of the photonic components are highly sensitive to thermal variations, which results in optical data misrouting through the optical networks at the presence of temperature fluctuation. In this paper, we propose a thermally-resilient all-optical communication approach which improves reliability, as well as performance of the optical networks. For this purpose, we take advantages of auxiliary waveguides and a novel wavelength assignment approach to avoid optical data routing through the hot regions. In this manner, each node is provided with an alternative path to resend the misrouted optical data in the case of fault occurrence. A novel all-optical Mesh-based architecture is opted for the proposed thermally-resilient optical communication approach, as well as the well-known λ-router, as direct and indirect all-optical non-blocking networks, respectively. Simulation results verify the prominence of the proposed reliable Mesh-based architecture against alternative architecture, in terms of network performance, thermal resilience, and throughput.