TWC-based approach for improving communication reliability in Optical Network-on-Chip

Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC) architectures are emerging as a new paradigm to interconnect a large number of processing cores at chip level, thereby enabling to meet the pressing demands for extremely high bandwidth and low power consumption. Some existing ONoC architectures are implemented in an electronic-controlled way in a two-layer 3D chip based on TSV (Through-Silicon Via). However, on-chip thermal effect is an inherent deficiency and chip temperature can fluctuate spatially, which can affect the operation of silicon nanophotonic devices. This leads to significant influence on the reliability of communications. To minimize the thermal impacts and improve the reliability, we propose a novel approach by adding a tunable wavelength converter (TWC) in the router for mesh-based ONoC. Simulation results show that our proposed approach can increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) effectively.