HELIX: Design and synthesis of hybrid nanophotonic application-specific network-on-chip architectures

Hybrid nanophotonic-electric networks-on-chip (NoC) have been recently proposed to overcome the challenges of high data transfer latencies and significant power dissipation in traditional electrical NoCs. But hybrid NoCs with nanophotonic guided waveguides and silicon microring resonator modulators impose many challenges such as high thermal tune up power and crossing losses. Due to these challenges productization of such architectures has yet to become commercially viable. Unfortunately, increasing embedded application complexity, hardware dependencies, and performance variability makes optimizing hybrid NoCs a daunting task because of the need to explore a massive design space at the system-level. To date, no prior work has addressed the problem of synthesizing application-specific hybrid nanophotonic-electric NoCs with an irregular topology. Considering the above unaddressed major challenges, in this paper we propose the HELIX framework for application-specific synthesis of hybrid NoC architectures that combine electrical NoCs with free-space nanophotonic NoCs. Based on our experimental studies, we demonstrate that our HELIX framework produces superior NoC architectures that achieve 3.06× power improvements compared to synthesis frameworks proposed in prior work for electrical NoCs.