All-optical wavelength-routed NoC based on a novel hierarchical topology

This paper proposes a novel topology for optical Network on Chip (NoC) architectures with the key advantages of regularity, vertex symmetry, scalability to large scale networks, constant node degree, and simplicity. Moreover, we propose a minimal deterministic routing algorithm for the proposed topology which leads to small and simple photonic routers. Built upon our novel network topology, we present a scalable all-optical NoC, referred to as 2D-HERT, which offers passive routing of optical data streams based on their wavelengths. Utilizing wavelength routing method along with Wavelength Division Multiplexing technique, our proposed optical NoC eliminates the need for electrical resource reservation. We compare performance of the proposed architecture against electrical NoCs and alternative all-optical on-chip architectures under various synthetic traffic patterns. Averaging through different traffic patterns, achieves average per-packet power reduction of 53%, 45%, and 95% over optical crossbar, λ-router, and electrical Torus, respectively.