Reducing Power Consumption of Lasers in Photonic NoCs through Application-Specific Mapping

Abstract

To face the complex communication problems that arise as the number of on-chip components grows up, photonic networks-on-chip (NoCs) have been recently proposed to replace electronic interconnects. However, photonic NoCs lack efficient laser sources, possibly resulting in an inefficient or inoperable architecture. In this article, we introduce a methodology for the design space exploration of optical NoC mapping solutions, which automatically assigns IPs/cores to the network tiles such that the laser power consumption is minimized. The experimental evaluation shows average reductions of 34.7% and 27.3% in the power consumption compared to, respectively, application-oblivious and randomly mapped photonic NoCs, allowing improved energy efficiency.