Improving crosstalk resilience with wavelength spacing in photonic crossbar-based network-on-chip architectures

Crosstalk noise can significantly reduce data transfer reliability in emerging photonic network-on-chip (PNoC) architectures. Undesirable mode coupling between photonic signals at microring resonators (MR) is the main cause of crosstalk in photonic waveguides. As emerging PNoC architectures employ dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) with multiple cascaded MRs, these architectures suffer from high crosstalk levels. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to this problem, by increasing the wavelength spacing between adjacent wavelengths in a DWDM waveguide to reduce crosstalk noise. Experimental results on two photonic crossbar architectures (Corona and Firefly) indicate that our approach improves worst-case signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by up to 51.7%.