arXiv subjects

Ian O 'Connor

Publications and source records attributed to Ian O 'Connor.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2015

Optical Crossbars on Chip: a comparative study based on worst-case losses

The many cores design research community have shown high interest in optical crossbars on chip for more than a decade. Key properties of optical crossbars, namely a) contention free data routing b) low latency communication and c) potential for high bandwidth through the use of WDM, motivate several implementations of this type of interconnect. These implementations demonstrate very different scalability and power efficiency ability depending on three key design factors: a) the network topology, b) the considered layout and the c) the injection losses induced by the fabrication process. In this paper, the worst-case optical losses of crossbar implementations are compared according to the factors mentioned above. The comparison results has the potential to help many cores system designer to select the most appropriate crossbar implementation according, for instance, to the number of IP cores and the chip die size.

cs.ET↗

arXiv2015

Energy-efficient optical crossbars on chip with multi-layer deposited silicon

The many cores design research community have shown high interest in optical crossbars on chip for more than a decade. Key properties of optical crossbars, namely a) contention-free data routing b) low-latency communication and c) potential for high bandwidth through the use of WDM, motivate several implementations. These implementations demonstrate very different scalability and power efficiency ability depending on three key design factors: a) the network topology, b) the considered layout and c) the insertion losses induced by the fabrication process. The emerging design technique relying on multi-layer deposited silicon allows reducing optical losses, which may lead to significant reduction of the power consumption. In this paper, multi-layer deposited silicon based crossbars are proposed and compared. The results indicate that the proposed ring-based network exhibits, on average, 22% and 51.4% improvement for worst-case and average losses respectively compared to the most power-efficient related crossbars.

cs.ET↗

arXiv2015

Thermal Aware Design Method for VCSEL-Based On-Chip Optical Interconnect

Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC) is an emerging technology considered as one of the key solutions for future generation on-chip interconnects. However, silicon photonic devices in ONoC are highly sensitive to temperature variation, which leads to a lower efficiency of Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers (VCSELs), a resonant wavelength shift of Microring Resonators (MR), and results in a lower Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). In this paper, we propose a methodology enabling thermal-aware design for optical interconnects relying on CMOS-compatible VCSEL. Thermal simulations allow designing ONoC interfaces with low gradient temperature and analytical models allow evaluating the SNR.

cs.ET↗