Towards a scalable, low-power all-optical architecture for networks-on-chip

Abstract

This article proposes a scalable wavelength-routed optical Network on Chip (NoC) based on the Spidergon topology, named Power-efficient Scalable Wavelength-routed Network-on-chip (PeSWaN). The key idea of the proposed all-optical architecture is the utilization of per-receiver wavelengths in the data network to prevent network contention and the adoption of per-sender wavelengths in the control network to avoid end-point contention. By performing a series of simulations, we study the efficiency of the proposed architecture, its power and energy consumption, and the data transmission delay. Moreover, we compare the proposed architecture with electrical NoCs and alternative ONoC architectures under various traffic patterns.