A Particle Swarm Optimization approach for synthesizing application-specific hybrid photonic networks-on-chip

Hybrid nanophotonic-electric networks-on-chip (NoC) have been recently proposed to overcome the challenges of significant power dissipation and high data transfer latencies in traditional electrical NoCs. However, with increasing embedded application complexity, hardware dependencies, and performance variability, optimizing hybrid nanophotonic-electric NoCs requires traversing a massive design space. No prior work has addressed this problem to the best of our knowledge. We present the first effort in this direction. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary algorithm framework to synthesize hybrid photonic NoCs by utilizing Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Simulated Annealing (SA). Our synthesis results indicate that the PSO-based framework generates more power efficient NoC fabrics compared to SA. The PSO synthesis approach optimizes the hybrid NoC fabric, achieving up to 18 × power reduction compared to the traditional electrical NoC demonstrating significant promise towards generating low power communication fabrics that meet performance objectives.