Scalable Architecture for Wavelength-Switched Optical NoC with Multicasting Capability

This paper proposes a novel all-optical router as a building block for a scalable wavelength-switched optical NoC. The proposed optical router, named as AOR, performs passive routing of optical data streams based on their wavelengths. Utilizing wavelength routing method, AOR eliminates the need for electrical resource reservation and the corresponding latency and area overheads. Taking advantage of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technique, the proposed architecture is capable of data multicasting, concurrent with unicast data transmission, with high bandwidth and low power dissipation, without imposing noticeable area and latency overheads. Comparing AOR against previously proposed optical routers, we deduce that the proposed router architecture reduces optical insertion loss, electrical power consumption, and number of micro rings, and also improves scalability of the on-chip network.