A Review of Optical Routers in Photonic Networks-on-Chip: A Literature Survey

Due to the increasing growth of processing cores in complex computational systems, all the connection converted bottleneck for all systems. With the protection of progressing and constructing complex photonic connection on chip, optical data transmission is the best choice for replacing with electrical interconnection for the reason of gathering connection with a high bandwidth and insertion loss on chip was mentioned. Optical routers play an important role in the Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC), which are responsible for selecting the path between optical signal source and the destination. In recent years, silicon optical routers based on Micro-Ring Resonators (MRRs) and Mach-Zehnder Interferometers (MZIs) have been proposed. The design of optical switches is desirable by using of Mach-Zehnder Interferometer. This is while that Micro Ring Resonator Switches have low bandwidth, whereas Mach-Zehnder Interferometer switches have wide bandwidth inherently. Mach-Zehnder Interferometer switches are able to routing with high speed for data transmission with Nano second switching time. This is while, that MRR switches in compare to MZIs has the less power consumption and area consumption. On the other hand we can divide optical routers into parts, A. general router and B. specific- router, so that in specific routers, some of I/O paths for the reason of avoiding deadlock had be omitted. In continue, several kinds of optical router based on MZI and MRR along with researching a series of parameters was mentioned.