Thermal-sensitive design and power optimization for a 3D torus-based optical NoC

Abstract

In order to overcome limitations of traditional electronic interconnects in terms of power efficiency and bandwidth density, optical networks-on-chip (NoCs) based on 3D integrated silicon photonics have been proposed as an emerging on-chip communication architecture for multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) with large core counts. However, due to thermo-optic effects, wavelength-selective silicon photonic devices such as microresonators, which are widely used in optical NoCs, suffer from temperature-dependent wavelength shifts. As a result, on-chip temperature variations cause significant thermal-induced optical power loss which may counteract the power advantages of optical NoCs. To tackle this problem, in this work, we present a thermal-sensitive design and power optimization approach for a 3D torus-based optical NoC architecture. Based on an optical thermal modeling platform which models the thermal effect in optical NoCs from a system-level perspective, a thermal-sensitive routing algorithm is proposed for the 3D torus-based optical NoC to optimize its power consumption in the presence of on-chip temperature variations. Simulation results show that in an 8×8×2 3D torus-based optical NoC under a set of real applications, as compared with a matched 3D mesh-based optical NoC with traditional dimension order routing, the power consumption is reduced by 25% if thermal tuning for microresonators is not utilized, by 19% if thermal tuning is utilized for microresonators, and by 17% if athermal microresonators are used.