Time-division-multiplexed arbitration in silicon nanophotonic networks-on-chip for high-performance chip multiprocessors

As the computational performance of microprocessors continues to grow through the integration of an increasing number of processing cores on a single die, the interconnection network has become the central subsystem for providing the communications infrastructure among the on-chip cores as well as to off-chip memory. Silicon nanophotonics as an interconnect technology offers several promising benefits for future networks-on-chip, including low end-to-end transmission energy and high bandwidth density of waveguides using wavelength division multiplexing. In this work, we propose the use of time-division-multiplexed distributed arbitration in a photonic mesh network composed of silicon micro-ring resonator based photonic switches, which provides round-robin fairness to setting up photonic circuit paths. Our design sustains over 10× more bandwidth and uses less power than the compared network designs. We also observe a 2× improvement in performance for memory-centric application traces using the MORE modeling system.