Optical-NoC: Future of New Computational Systems

Networks-on-chip (NoC) is one of the main elements in today's computation systems. These are working as core engines for delivering high throughput. Regardless of providing high performance, there is some limitation in wired NoC like bandwidth, power consumption, and high latency, which influence researchers to find new NoC architectures. These architectures may enhance the computation power and provide desired results. In this paper, we compare three types of NoC designs which include wired-NoC, wireless-NoC and Optical-NoC. These architectures are compared based on hop counts, energy efficiency and communication latency while communicating among nodes. These factors play a major role in any NoC performance. Furthermore, results show what is the importance of optical interconnects over both wire and wireless NoC and they might change the future of NoC. Thus, using optical interconnects may lead to the new era of new computational devices that are used in real-time computation systems.