arXiv subjects

Ishan Thakkar

Publications and source records attributed to Ishan Thakkar.

20 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Redesigning Photonic Interconnects with Silicon-on-Sapphire Device Platform for Ultra-Low-Energy On-Chip Communication

Traditional silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform based on-chip photonic interconnects have limited energy-bandwidth scalability due to the optical non-linearity induced power constraints of the constituent photonic devices. In this paper, we propose to break this scalability barrier using a new silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) based photonic device platform. Our physical-layer characterization results show that SOS-based photonic devices have negligible optical non-linearity effects in the mid-infrared region near 4μm, which drastically alleviates their power constraints. Our link-level analysis shows that SOS-based photonic devices can be used to realize photonic links with aggregated data rate of more than 1 Tb/s, which recently has been deemed unattainable for the SOI-based photonic on-chip links. We also show that such high-throughput SOS-based photonic links can significantly improve the energy-efficiency of on-chip photonic communication architectures. Our system-level analysis results position SOS-based photonic interconnects to pave the way for realizing ultra-low-energy (< 1 pJ/bit) on-chip data transfers.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2020

LORAX: Loss-Aware Approximations for Energy-Efficient Silicon Photonic Networks-on-Chip

The approximate computing paradigm advocates for relaxing accuracy goals in applications to improve energy-efficiency and performance. Recently, this paradigm has been explored to improve the energy efficiency of silicon photonic networks-on-chip (PNoCs). In this paper, we propose a novel framework (LORAX) to enable more aggressive approximation during communication over silicon photonic links in PNoCs. Given that silicon photonic interconnects have significant power dissipation due to the laser sources that generate the wavelengths for photonic communication, our framework attempts to reduce laser power overheads while intelligently approximating communication such that application output quality is not distorted beyond an acceptable limit. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that considers loss-aware laser power management and multilevel signaling to enable effective data approximation and energy-efficiency in PNoCs. Simulation results show that our framework can achieve up to 31.4% lower laser power consumption and up to 12.2% better energy efficiency than the best known prior work on approximate communication with silicon photonic interconnects, for the same application output quality

cs.AR↗