Lighting Up On-Chip Communications with Photonics: Design Tradeoffs for Optical NoC Architectures

Photonic on-chip interconnects are today considered a major pathway to face the insatiable performance demand of manycore computers within tight power constraints. This article provides a broad overview of the opportunities and challenges posed at the architecture level by this new interconnect paradigm. In fact, silicon Photonics introduces many new design tradeoffs, having no electronic equivalent, involving aspects such as wavelength selectivity, physical constraints, and spectral parallelism. As highlighted throughout the paper, getting a cross-cutting understanding of these tradeoffs is essential for harnessing the full potential of on-chip Photonics.