A Fault-Tolerant Routing Algorithm Design for On-Chip Optical Networks

Optical networks have been considered for on-chip communications due to its advantages on bandwidth density, power efficiency and propagation speed over the electrical counterpart. However, the major optical device-micro ring resonator is very sensitive to manufacturing errors and temperature fluctuations, which results in the bandwidth loss or even the failure of optical link. Thus, this paper proposes a fault-tolerant and deadlock-free routing algorithm to improve the reliability of on-chip optical network without requiring additional virtual channel. In addition, a path selection mechanism taking account of the actual bandwidth of the optical link affected by fabrication and temperature variations is implemented in the routing unit. The simulation results show that compared to the conventional fault-tolerant routing methods, our routing algorithm can improve the transmission latency and throughput of the network under static and dynamic link faults by up to 51% and 22%, respectively.