RONoC: A Reconfigurable Architecture for Application-Specific Optical Network-on-Chip

Abstract

Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC) is a promising emerging technology, which can solve the bottlenecks faced by electrical on-chip interconnection. However, the existing proposals of ONoC are mostly built on fixed topologies, which are not flexible enough to support various applications. To make full use of the limited resource and provide a more efficient approach for resource allocation, RONoC (Reconfigurable Optical Network-on-Chip) is proposed in this letter. The topology can be reconfigured to meet the requirement of different applications. An 8×8 nonblocking router is also designed, together with the communication mechanism. The simulation results show that the saturation load of RONoC is 2 times better than mesh, and the energy consumption is 25% lower than mesh.