QuT: A low-power optical Network-on-Chip

To enable the adoption of optical Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) and allow them to scale to large systems, they must be designed to consume less power and energy. Therefore, optical NoCs must use a small number of wavelengths, avoid excessive insertion loss and reduce the number of microring resonators. We propose the Quartern Topology (QuT), a novel low-power all-optical NoC. We also propose a deterministic wavelength routing algorithm based on Wavelength Division Multiplexing that allows us to reduce the number of wavelengths and microring resonators in optical routers. The key advantages of QuT network are simplicity and lower power consumption. We compare QuT against three alternative all-optical NoCs: optical Spidergon, λ-router and Corona under different synthetic traffic patterns. QuT demonstrates good scalability with significantly lower power and competitive latency. Our optical topology reduces power by 23%, 86.3% and 52.7% compared with 128-node optical Spidergon, λ-router and Corona, respectively.

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