Efficient Sharing of Optical Resources in Low-Power Optical Networks-on-Chip

Abstract

With the ever-growing core counts in modern computing systems, NoCs consume an increasing part of the power budget due to bandwidth and power density limitations of electrical interconnects. To maintain performance and power scaling, alternative technologies are required, with silicon photonics being a promising candidate thanks to high-bandwidth, low-energy data transmission.In order to get the best of silicon photonics, sophisticated network designs are required to minimize static power overheads. In this paper, we propose Amon, a low-power ONoC that decreases number of Rings, wavelengths and path losses to reduce power consumption. Amon performs destination checking prior to data transmission on an underlying control network, allowing the sharingof optical bandwidth. Compared to a wide range of state-of-the-art optical, hybrid, and electrical NoCs, Amon improves Throughput per- Watt by at least 23% (up to 70%), while reducing power without latency overheads on both synthetic and realistic applications. For aggressive optical technology parameters, Amon considerably outperforms all alternative NoCs in terms of power, outlining its increasing superiority as technology matures