Low Latency and Energy Efficient Optical Network-on-Chip Using Wavelength Assignment

Optical network-on-chip (ONoC) is a promising technology for high-performance and energy-efficient intra-chip interconnection. Many existing proposals resort to high-density wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) to increase bandwidth and to mitigate contention. Unfortunately, high-density WDM increases the cost of optical devices and the difficulties of integration. We propose WANoC, a novel ONoC design with careful wavelength assignment aimed at more effective reuse. A novel WDM optical router is also designed with simple layout, which needs fewer waveguides and has fewer crossings. The simulation results show that the saturation load is improved more than 2.7 times, while the energy consumption is decreased by 33% compared with prior circuit-switched ONoC.