A complete electronic network interface architecture for global contention-free communication over emerging optical networks-on-chip

Abstract

Although many valuable research works have investigated the properties of optical networks-on-chip (ONoCs), the vast majority of them lack an accurate exploration of the network interface architecture (NI) required to support optical communications on the silicon chip. The complexity of this architecture is especially critical for a specific kind of ONoCs: wavelength-routed ones. From a logical viewpoint, they can be considered as full nonblocking crossbars, thus the control complexity is implemented at the NIs. To our knowledge, this paper proposes the first complete NI architecture for wavelength-routed optical NoCs, by coping with the intricacy of networking issues such as flow control, buffering strategy, deadlock avoidance, serialization, and above all, with their codesign in a complete architecture.