Architectures and routing schemes for optical network-on-chips

As indicated in the latest version of ITRS roadmap, optical wiring is a viable interconnect technology for future SoC/SiC/SiP designs that can provide broad band data transfer rates unmatchable by the existing metal/low-k dielectric interconnects. In this paper, we present an interconnection architecture, referred as the wavelength routed optical network (WRON), suitable to build on-chip optical micro-networks. The routing scheme for WRON, using any two of the three routing parameters (the source node address, the destination node address, and the routing wavelength), is generalized in this paper. With WRON as the primitive platform, we further propose a new recursive architecture, the recursive wavelength routed optical network (RCWRON), and it serves as the basis of a redundant architecture, the redundant wavelength routed optical network (RDWRON). The routing schemes for RCWRON and RDWRON are also detailed in this paper. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.