Cross-Layer Thermal Reliability Management in Silicon Photonic Networks-on-Chip

Abstract

Silicon photonics technology is being considered for future net-works-on-chip (NoCs) as it can enable high bandwidth density and lower latency with traversal of data at the speed of light. But the operation of photonic NoCs (PNoCs) is very sensitive to on-chip temperature variations. These variations can create significant relia-bility issues for PNoCs. This paper presents a run-time cross-layer framework to overcome temperature variation-induced reliability issues in PNoCs. The framework consists of a device-level reactive mechanism and a system-level proactive technique to avoid on-chip thermal threshold violations and mitigate thermal reliability issues. Our analysis indicates that this framework can reliably satisfy on-chip thermal thresholds and maintain high network bandwidth while reducing power dissipation over state-of-the-art solutions.