A Hybrid Optoelectronic Networks-on-Chip Architecture

Optical/Photonic networks-on-chip (NoC) have been considered as a promising and viable paradigm to interconnect a large number of processing cores at chip level. Hybrid optoelectronic NoCs provide a more practical solution by using the electronic network for local communication while the optical network for global communication. This paper explores how to efficiently combine optical and electronic networks to build a hybrid NoC. A butterfly fat tree-based hybrid optoelectronic NoC architecture is proposed using the generic wavelength-routed optical router. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with electronic mesh- and CMesh-based NoCs, the proposed hybrid NoC achieves the best power efficiency with comparable throughput and significantly reduces the latency under localized traffic.