On a Scalable, Non-Blocking Optical Router for Photonic Networks-on-Chip Designs

Photonic Networks-on-Chip (NoC) is considered as a promising candidate to interconnect a large number of processing cores. The heart of a photonic NoC is the on chip photonic interconnection network which is composed of silicon waveguides and optical routers. In this paper, we propose a scalable and non-blocking passive optical router design using micro-ring resonators (MRRs), namely the generic wavelength-routed optical router (GWOR). We first introduce a 4×4 GWOR router structure and then show how to construct larger size GWORs using 4×4 GWOR as the basic building block The wavelength assignment schemes for any size GWORs are also derived. For N×N GWOR, N-l input wavelengths are needed and iV-2 different types of MRRs are used. The analysis shows that 4×4 GWOR uses the least number of MMRs and has the least power loss compared with existing router designs.