LACE: A non-blocking on-chip optical router by utilizing the wavelength routing technology

Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC) is deemed as a promising candidate in future on-chip interconnection scenario. It is superior to the traditional electrical NoC in many aspects, such as the bandwidth density, power consumption and scalability. On-chip optical router is an indispensable building block in ONoC design. However, most reported optical routers are with four or five ports, which cannot be easily grafted into the network with the need for 3D interconnect or high concentration. In this paper, we propose LACE, a non-blocking on-chip optical router with 8 ports, which is appropriate for the 3D interconnect and high-concentration network. By embracing the Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technique, LACE can implement non-blocking communication between different ports. The evaluation results show that LACE has lower area cost and lower insertion loss compared to the alternatives.