LioeSim: A Network Simulator for Hybrid Opto-Electronic Networks-on-Chip Analysis

The development of nanophotonics in the last decades indicates a good opportunity for constructing the opto-electronic networks on chip. Hybrid opto-electronic network-on-chip (HNoC) is an emerging communication architecture that can offer high bandwidth and low latency to many-core systems-on-chip. Photonic devices are fundamentally different from conventional electronic devices so that new modeling and analysis methods are urgently needed in order to analyze both physical-level and system-level performances of HNoCs. In this paper, we introduce LioeSim, a network simulator for HNoCs analysis that incorporates an accurate parameterized all-round photonic device library. We also describe how to construct mesh-based HNoCs with the fundamental mesh-based topology inside LioeSim. To demonstrate the diverse capabilities of LioeSim, we perform some case studies of clustered mesh-based HNoCs and two typical HNoCs with optical bus by illustrating the comparisons with latency, power consumptions, and efficiency.