Votex: A non-blocking optical router design for 3D Optical Network on Chip

Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC) has attracted much attention from many researchers with the advancement of silicon photonics technology. ONoC combined with 3D integration technology can address some issues of two-dimensional architectures such as long distance and limited scalability. Most routers are with four or five ports, which cannot meet the demand of 3D networks. In this paper, we proposed Votex: a novel non-blocking optical router with seven ports, aiming at satisfying the requirements of 3D ONoC. As a case study, we compared Votex with the previously reported 7×7 crossbar. The result shows that Votex has lower insertion loss and requires less power.