Crosstalk-Aware Mapping for Tile-Based Optical Network-on-Chip

Silicon photonics appears today a promising solution to handle future communication needs. However, photonic networks-on-chip suffer from crosstalk noise which affects the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) constraining the network scalability. In this paper, we first formulate the problem of crosstalk-aware mapping and then we propose an algorithm which automatically maps the IP cores onto a generic mesh-based photonic NoC architecture such that the worst-case crosstalk is minimized. Experimental results show that the crosstalk noise can be significantly reduced allowing a higher network scalability.