Contention-Free Routing for Hybrid Photonic Mesh-Based Network-on-Chip Systems

Photonic Networks-on-Chip (PNoCs) have emerged as an auspicious solution to solve the interconnect bottleneck found in their electronic counterparts. Thanks to their low-power properties and the tremendous achieved throughput, PNoCs are presented as highly scalable architectures that can satisfy the requirements of future generation many-core systems. In conventional hybrid PNoC systems, the path-setup algorithm determines the route and the required resources necessary for the end-to-end optical data transfer. Thus, this algorithm should be carefully designed as it plays a crucial role in determining the performance and power efficiency of such systems. In this paper, we present a contention-free routing for photonic mesh-based network-on-chip systems. The algorithm allows data and control/configuration signals to be transferred in the optical network. When implemented on our PHENIC-II system, evaluation results show that the End-to-End (ETE) latency is reduced by 40% and the overall energy of the electronic control module is reduced by 23% when compared to conventional hybrid PNoC systems.