A Multilayered Design Approach for Efficient Hybrid 3D Photonics Network-on-chip

In Chip Multiprocessors, traditional metallic interconnects will soon reach their bandwidth and energy dissipation limits. Photonic NoC (PNoC) is a promising alternative to renew higher performance in the advent of rising number of cores on chip. Efficient PNoC architectures are needed to reduce laser related energy consumption and maintain high performance. In this work we propose a novel sandwich layered approach to design a 3D PNoC architecture that is able to reduce no of hops, cross over points, and no of laser sources using multiplexing techniques. The 3D hybrid PNoC uses high performance 5X5 photonic routers incorporating mode division multiplexing (MDM) along with wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and time division multiplexing (TDM). Experimental results demonstrates an increase in aggregated bandwidth up to 4x while reducing average energy consumption per router by 83\% as compared to the recently reported results.