Design of high bandwidth photonic NoC architectures using optical multilevel signaling

Network-on-chip (NoC) is a key component for boosting the system performance of future chip multiprocessors. With the projected increase in the number of cores on the chip, the NoC is perceived to be the limiting component for performance and scaling. Photonic NoCs are under serious consideration for scaling future multicore architectures. In this paper, we propose two photonic NoC architectures based on an optical multilevel signaling technique that can double the transmission bandwidth and reduce the area requirements. Simulation studies show that the proposed methodology saves up to 53% of power and reduces the area overhead by as much as 81% compared with metallic-based NoCs.