Increasing Communication Path Diversity in Mesh-Based ONoC by Using Multi-Interface Processing Cores

Communication path diversity has been greatly limited in most of existing Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC) architectures, because one processing core is connected to only one optical router. This paper considers multi-interface processing core to increase the path diversity in ONoC. According to mesh architecture, we propose communication protocols that suits the multi-interface ONoC, including routing strategy, and the switching mechanism. Besides, a network interface and an 8x8 optical router architecture are designed to support the multiple interfaces and the protocols. We analyze the performance per area of the multi-interface ONoC architecture. The simulation results show that multi-interface ONoC reduces 66.7% in end-to-end delay per area and increases by 1.7x in maximum throughput per area, compared with the single-interface ONoC architecture under hot-spot traffic pattern.