A shortest path adaptive routing technique for minimizing path collisions in hybrid optical network-on-chip

Hybrid optical network-on-chip (HONoC) is a promising alternative to all-electrical NoC whose capability in the performance and the power consumption is facing ultimate physical limitation. However, the latency unfairness problem and the associated performance degradation due to the circuit switched characteristic of HONoC must be resolved. In this paper, we propose a new shortest path adaptive routing technique for HONoC by exploiting an elaborate rollback scheme and a rapid flow control method to promote the fast routing path setup and the parallel data transfers. Compared to existing works, experimental results show reduction by 41.6% in latency and improvement by 16.9% in throughput with negligible extra energy consumption. Additional benefits in the network resource utilization and the performance under increasing network sizes are also analyzed.