Design and synthesis of hybrid nanophotonic-electric network-on-chip architectures
Date
2014
Authors
Bahirat, Shirish, author
Pasricha, Sudeep, advisor
Bohm, Wim, committee member
Chen, T. W., committee member
Siegel, H. J., committee member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
With increasing application complexity and improvements in CMOS process technology, chip multiprocessors (CMPs) with tens to hundreds of cores on a chip are today becoming a reality. Networks on Chip (NoCs) have emerged as a scalable communication fabric that can support high bandwidth communications in such massively parallel multi-core systems. However, traditional electrical NoC implementations today face significant challenges due to high data transfer latencies, low throughput, and high power dissipation. Silicon nanophotonics on a chip has recently been proposed to overcome limitations of electrical wires. However, designing and optimizing hybrid electro-photonic NoCs requires complex trade-offs and overcoming many design challenges such as thermal tuning, power, and crossing loss overheads. In this thesis, these challenges are addressed by proposing novel hybrid electro-photonic NoC architectures and novel synthesis hybrid NoC frameworks for emerging CMPs. The proposed hybrid electro-photonic NoC architectures are designed for waveguide-based and free-space-based silicon nanophotonics implementations. These architectures are optimized for low-cost, low-power, and low-area overhead, support dynamic reconfiguration to adapt the changing runtime traffic requirements, and have been adapted for both 2D and 3D CMPs. The proposed synthesis frameworks utilize various optimization algorithms such as evolutionary techniques, linear programming, and custom heuristics to perform rapid design space exploration of hybrid electro-photonic (2D and 3D) NoC architectures and trade-off performance and power objectives. Experimental results indicate a strong motivation to consider the proposed architectures for future CMPs, with several orders of magnitude reduction in power consumption and improvements in network throughput and access latencies, compared to traditional electrical 2D and 3D NoC architectures. Compared to other previously proposed hybrid electro-photonic NoC architectures, the proposed architectures are also shown to have lower photonic area overhead, power consumption, and energy-delay product, while maintaining competitive throughput and latency. Unlike any prior work to date, our synthesis frameworks allow further tuning and customization of our proposed architectures to meet designer-specific goals. Together, the architectural and synthesis framework contributions bring the promise of silicon nanophotonics in future massively parallel CMPs closer to reality.
Description
Rights Access
Subject
CMP
hybrid nanophotonics
MPSOC
NOC
photonics
SOC