A Novel Optical Mesh Network-on-Chip for Gigascale Systems-on-Chip

Nanoscale CMOS technologies are posing new network-on-chip (NoC) concepts to gigascale system-on-chip (SoCs). However, electronic network on chip designs face several problems like energy consumption, bandwidth and latency. Optical NoC (ONoC) promises to solve these problems. The advances in nanoscale photonic technology make ONoCs possible. This paper proposes a new non-blocking optical router, OXY, and uses it to build a 2D mesh ONoC. OXY based optical mesh NoC fully utilizes the properties of XY routing in 2D networks, and significantly reduce the number of microring resonators required for ONoCs. We compared OXY based optical mesh NoC with three other schemes in number of microring resonators, loss and energy consumption. The results show that OXY based optical mesh NoC achieves the best in all the comparisons. We simulated 2D optical mesh ONoC based on OXY, and showed the end-to-end delay and throughput under different traffic loads and network sizes.