A Novel Architecture with Low Laser Power Based on Optical Networks-on-Chip

Optical Networks-on-Chip (ONoCs) has turned into the mainstream trend in the field of multi-core processors, owing to its low latency, low energy consumption, and high bandwidth. As a key component of ONoCs, on-chip lasers are the dominant source of power consumption. Especially in mesh-based ONoCs, there are a lot of long Manhattan Distance paths which cause serious insertion loss. And in order to meet the threshold of photodetector, the output power of laser had to be greatly increased. In this paper, a novel double-layer ONoCs architecture based on the partition of Virtual-Cluster in mesh is proposed, named VCmesh, which greatly decreases the hops of long Manhattan Distance communication. The simulation results and analyses indicate that compared with the typical mesh-based ONoCs, the VCmesh-based ONoCs can greatly reduce the output power of laser to effectively save consumption on chip.