Review of Packet Switching Technologies for Future NoC

Recent technological developments have shown huge advances in semi-conductor based System on Chip (SoC). However, limitations of such technology has quickly become an obstacle for the fast and highly demanding development of general or application specific SoCs. Since research in semi-conductor devices has reached its saturation, researchers look for alternative solutions. Optical technology is emerging as the leader due to its very high bandwidth capabilities (the main constraint of semi-conductor technology). In this paper, we analyze the most recent developments for optical Network on Chip (NoC) as a basic architecture for SoC. Packet switching remains most popular due to scalability and reliability issues, as well as due to variety of applications it is designed for. While optical switching technologies promise high speed interconnection, buffering technologies havenpsilat matured enough to support fully optical packet switching NoCs. What is the current state and what are the expectations from the optical/photonics technologies? The paper tries to study these issues and provide an answer.