Path Setup for Hybrid NoC Architectures Exploiting Flooding and Standby

Future many-core systems will require energy-efficient, high-throughput and low-latency communication architectures. Silicon Photonics appears today a promising solution towards these goals. The inability of photonics networks to perform inflight buffering and logic computation suggests the use of hybrid photonic-electronic architectures. In order to exploit the full potential of photonics, it is essential to carefully design the path-setup architecture, which is a primary source of performance degradation and power consumption. In this paper, we propose a new path-setup approach which can put allocated circuits in a stand-by state, rapidly restoring them when needed. Path-setup messages are sent using a flooding routing strategy to enhance the possibility of finding free optical paths. We compare the proposed approach with a commonly used path-setup strategy as well as some other alternatives available. The results exhibit encouraging improvements in terms of both performance and energy consumption.