Comparative performance evaluation of wireless and optical NoC architectures

Network-on-Chip architectures with various new emerging interconnect technologies offer unprecedented performance gain compared to their more conventional planar metal interconnect-based counterparts. A comparative analysis of these emerging NoCs will provide a better understanding towards adopting them in the mainstream design. This paper compares performance of small-world NoC architectures having wireless and RF links with optical NoCs and presents design trade offs with system size scaling. Our analysis demonstrates that the small-world NoC architecture with THz wireless shortcuts provides the best performance-area overhead trade-off compared to the other NoCs for both uniform and non-uniform traffic across various system sizes.