Topology exploration of a thermally resilient wavelength-based ONoC

Abstract

With the growing number of cores, high-performance systems face power challenges due to dominating communication power. Thus, attaining energy efficient high-bandwidth inter-core communication nominates photonic network-on chip as the most promising interconnection paradigm. Although photonic networks pave the way for extremely higher performance communications, their intrinsic susceptibility to thermal fluctuations intimidates reliability of system. This necessitates the development of methodologies to analyze and model thermal effects on network behavior. In this paper, we model temperature fluctuations of optical chips and analyze photonic networks in a holistic approach. We present a novel wavelength-routed all-optical mesh network-on-chip, which significantly reduces optical contention scenarios throughout the network. While leveraging slightly larger number of wavelengths, it attains tolerance against thermal-induced faults. Our proposed architecture is compared against a popular wavelength-routed network, i.e. λ-router, in terms of throughput, in the presence of temperature drifts. Moreover, reliability comparison addressing fault rate in terms of temperature variation reveals that our proposed architecture significantly outperforms λ-router, as its competitor.