System Level Assessment of an Optical NoC in an MPSoC Platform

In the near future, multi-processor systems-on-chip (MPSoC) will become the main thrust driving the evolution of integrated circuits. MPSoCs introduce new challenges, mainly due to growing communication through their interconnect structure. Current electrical interconnects face hard challenges to overcome such data flows. Integrated optical interconnect is a potential technological improvement to reduce these problems. The main contributions of this paper are: i) the optical network integration in a system-level MPSoC platform; and ii) the quantitative evaluation of optical interconnect for MPSoC design using a multimedia application