Hybrid Router Design for High Performance Photonic Network-On-Chip

Abstract

With rising density of cores in Chip-Multiprocessors, traditional metallic interconnects won't be able to cater to the high demand in communication bandwidth at lower power consumption. Photonic interconnects are emerging as a very competitive and promising alternative to address these bottlenecks in recent times. The infrastructure for realizing such a communication architecture comprises of Micro Ring-resonator based silicon nano-photonic routers and waveguides. We propose a novel 5x5 photonic router microarchitecture employing mode-division-multiplexing along with wavelength-division-multiplexing and time-division-multiplexing. It increases the aggregate bandwidth almost four times in a network consuming almost 30% less power as compared to other recent photonic routers and laying the foundation of a high performance photonic network-on-chip(PNoC). We validated the feasibility of the proposed architecture and developed a new circuit switched based network simulator(PhotoNoxim) based on the router microarchitecture proposed by us to validate it under various synthetic traffics and benchmark applications.