Interconnection networks must transport an always increasing information density and connect a rising number of processing units. Electronic technologies have been able to sustain the traffic growth rate, but are getting close to their physical limits. In this context, optical interconnection networks are becoming progressively more attractive, especially because new photonic devices can be directly integrated in CMOS technology. Indeed, interest in microring resonators as switching components

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... s rising, but their usability in full optical interconnection architectures is still limited by their physical characteristics. Indeed, differently from classical devices used for switching, switching elements based on microring resonators exhibit asymmetric power losses depending on the output ports input signals are directed to. In this paper, we study classical interconnection architectures such as crossbar, Benes and Clos networks exploiting microring resonators as building blocks. Since classical interconnection networks lack either scalability or complexity, we propose two new architectures to improve performance of microring based interconnection networks while keeping a reasonable complexity. 978-1-4244-6404-3/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE ICC 2010 proceedings Authorized licensed use limited to: Politecnico di Torino. Downloaded on July 07,2010 at 07:43:14 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.