Design and Evaluation of Virtual Channel-Based Optical-Electrical Interface for Optical Network-on-Chip

Nanophotonic interconnects have recently emerged as a promising candidate for on-chip communication in future chip multi-processors (CMPs), by providing high bandwidth chip wide communication at low latency and power overhead. Optical electrical interfaces are important components in an optical NoC (ONoC), whose role lies in transporting data packets from the network interfaces (NIs) of local processing units to the optical modulators, and dispatching the demodulated packets to the destination NIs. In this paper we propose virtual channel (VC) based interface architecture and introduce its implementation in detail. Control table-based virtual channels are used as our interface organization which may eliminate HoL blocking, trigger moderate nominations and show more flexibility. Simulation results show that our VC-based architecture can achieve up to 90% performance of the full VOQ, while consuming only 71% static energy and surpass the full VOQ and m-VOQ in terms of throughput-energy ratio by 80% and 4% respectively.