Design of an NoC with on-chip photonic interconnects using adaptive CDMA links

Network on Chip (NoC) has established itself as a new paradigm for future generations of systems-on-chips (SoC) by providing the possibility of on-chip communication among the cores and thereby meeting the design productivity, scalability and signal integrity challenges of next-generation system designs. Photonic NoCs are being explored by present day researchers as a plausible solution towards the metal-interconnect problems like delay and power in NoCs. The design of a photonic Network on Chip, due to the high area and energy requirements of photonic interconnect, is a challenging issue. Currently, photonic network on chips utilize dense wavelength division multiplexing by modulating multiple high bandwidth wavelength channels from an off chip broadband LASER source. We use adaptive Code Division Multiple Access techniques with the above method to allocate a single wavelength channel to multiple transceivers, each one being allocated a unique PN code. The design has been simulated in Phoenixsim on OMNET++ framework and CDMA tranceivers were synthesized in Synopsys environment. This results in significant reductions in optical insertion loss and area.