No.031 Many-cores and On-chip Interconnects

Silicon photonics Network-on-Chips (NoCs) have　emerged as an attractive　solution to alleviate the high power consumption of traditional electronic　interconnects. In this work, we propose a fully optical ring NoC that　combines static and dynamic wavelength allocation communication mechanisms.
A different wavelength-channel is statically　allocated to each destination　node for light weight communication. Contention of simultaneous　communication requests from multiple source nodes to the destination is solved by a token based arbitration for the particular wavelength-channel.
For heavy load communication, a multiwavelength-channel is available by requesting it in execution time from source node to a special node that　manages dynamic allocation of the shared multiwavelength-channel among all nodes. We combine these static and dynamic communication mechanisms in a same network that introduces selection techniques based on message
size and congestion information. We discuss performance of the proposed photonic NoC based on preliminary simulation results.

Key words: Network-on-Chip, High-bandwidth and low power network, Silicon photonics, Wavelength allocation.