Amon: An Advanced Mesh-like Optical NoC

Optical networks-on-chip constitute a promising approach to tackle the power wall problem present in large-scale circuit design. In this paper, we propose Amon, an all-optical, mesh-like design based on passive microrings and wave-length division multiplexing, including the switch architecture and a contention-free routing algorithm. Amon provides power efficiency by decreasing the number of microrings, wavelengths and path lengths, which, in turn, reduces ring heater and laser power, and the required area. An analytic comparison of Amon against the state-of-the-art, low power, ring-based designs QuT and Spidergon shows that Amon significantly reduces network diameter and number of microrings. Our experimental results using DSENT show that Amon provides better scalability up to 256 nodes, significant power and area savings of up to 68% and 21%, respectively, while imposing only low wiring overhead and design complexity. Finally, Amon provides a tile-based structure which should facilitate VLSI integration.