Time-division-multiplexed arbitration in silicon nanophotonic networks-on-chip for high-performance chip multiprocessors

Gilbert Hendry, Eric Robinson, Vitaliy Gleyzer, Johnnie Chan, Luca P. Carloni, Nadya Bliss, Keren Bergman
2011 Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing  
As the computational performance of microprocessors continues to grow through the integration of an increasing number of processing cores on a single die, the interconnection network has become the central subsystem for providing the communications infrastructure among the on-chip cores as well as to offchip memory. Silicon nanophotonics as an interconnect technology offers several promising benefits for future networks-on-chip, including low end-to-end transmission energy and high bandwidth
more » ... sity of waveguides using wavelength division multiplexing. In this work, we propose the use of time-divisionmultiplexed distributed arbitration in a photonic mesh network composed of silicon micro-ring resonator based photonic switches, which provides round-robin fairness to setting up photonic circuit paths. Our design sustains over 10× more bandwidth and uses less power than the compared network designs. We also observe a 2× improvement in performance for memory-centric application traces using the MORE modeling system.
doi:10.1016/j.jpdc.2010.09.009 fatcat:ekb3tejktbe3jot2e7qrnmxxc4