Scalable power-efficient kilo-core photonic-wireless NoC architectures

As technology scales, hundreds and thousands of cores are being integrated on a single-chip. Since metallic interconnects may not scale effectively to support thousands of cores, architects have proposed emerging technologies such as photonics and wireless for intra-chip communication. While photonics technology is limited by the complexity and thermal effects, wireless technology for on-chip communication is limited by the available bandwidth. In this paper, we combine the benefits of both technologies into novel architecture that takes advantage of the communication benefits of both technologies while circumventing their limits. We discuss the scalability of the proposed architecture to kilo-core system using wireless technology. We evaluate the power consumption, throughput and latency for 256 and 1024 core architectures when compared to photonics-only, wireless-wired, wireless-photonics and wired-only architectures on synthetic traffic traces. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed architecture and design methodology can have significant impact on the overall network power and performance.