Power Allocation Method for TDM-Based Optical Network on Chip

Optical Network on Chip has emerged as a high-efficiency interconnection for the future generation of many-core system-on-chips because of its high bandwidth, low interference, and low power consumption. However, only a few papers discuss the allocation of laser power to each node. The even distribution method of laser power ignores the difference of communication requests for each node. In this letter, we first discuss the design of a power waveguide and how to guide light for each source node. Then, a method to allocate optical power to each node is proposed. The method is based on time division multiplexing. By considering the communication requests, the new method can save 92% and 92.8% of the total laser power, respectively, in an 8 x 8 mesh compared with even distribution method under uniform and matrix transpose traffic.