Reconfigurable Silicon-Photonic Network with Improved Channel Sharing for Multicore Architectures

On-chip communication is widely considered to be one of the major performance bottlenecks in contemporary chip multiprocessors (CMPs). With recent advances in silicon nanophotonics, photonic-based networks-on-chip (NoCs) are being considered as a viable option for communication in emerging CMPs as they can enable higher bandwidth and lower power dissipation compared to traditional electrical NoCs. In this paper, we present UltraNoC, a novel reconfigurable silicon-photonic NoC architecture that features improved channel sharing and supports dynamic re-prioritization and exchange of bandwidth between clusters of cores running multiple applications, to increase channel utilization and performance. Experimental results show that UltraNoC improves throughput by up to 9.8× while reducing latency by up to 55% and energy-delay product by up to 90% over state-of-the-art solutions.