Optimized designs of low loss non-blocking optical router for ONoC applications

Abstract

Recently, optical network on chip (ONoC) has attracted the attention of researchers as a promising technology for low power and high bandwidth on chip communication. ONoC improves the computational efficiency of multi-core processors and chips. However, their performance suffers from power losses and limited scalability. In this paper, we present two innovative designs of five port non-blocking ONoC routers constructed by using micro-ring resonators and waveguides for low power losses and the optimum number of components. We compared the performance of the designed routers with previously reported optical routers for the power insertion loss and the requirement of micro-ring resonators. The result shows that proposed optical routers have the lowest power losses and require a lower number of micro-ring resonators. First proposed router has 1.3% lower average loss and 9.8% lower maximum port to port loss as compared to Cygnus router. The second proposed router has 4.8% lower average loss than Cygnus router. The results also show that the performance of both the routers is far better than the crossbar router. The second proposed router requires only fifteen micro-ring resonators, that is 6% lower than Cygnus router.