Optical networks-on-chip (ONoCs) using wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology have progressively attracted more and more attention for their use in tackling the high-power consumption and low bandwidth issues in growing metallic interconnection networks in multiprocessor systems-on-chip. However, the basic optical devices employed to construct WDM-based ONoCs are imperfect and suffer from inevitable power loss and crosstalk noise. Furthermore, when employing WDM, optical signals of various wavelengths can interfere with each other through different optical switching elements within the network, creating crosstalk noise. As a result, the crosstalk noise in large-scale WDM-based ONoCs accumulates and causes severe performance degradation, restricts the network scalability, and considerably attenuates the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this paper, we systematically study and compare the worst case as well as the average crosstalk noise and SNR in three well-known optical interconnect architectures, mesh-based, folded-torus-based, and fat-tree-based ONoCs using WDM. The analytical models for the worst case and the average crosstalk noise and SNR in the different architectures are presented. Furthermore, the proposed analytical models are integrated into a newly developed crosstalk noise and loss analysis platform (CLAP) to analyze the crosstalk noise and SNR in WDM-based ONoCs of any network size using an arbitrary optical router. Utilizing CLAP, we compare the worst case as well as the average crosstalk noise and SNR in different WDM-based ONoC architectures. Furthermore, we indicate how the SNR changes in respect to variations in the number of optical wavelengths in use, the free-spectral range, and the microresonators $\boldsymbol {Q}$ factor. The analyses’ results demonstrate that the crosstalk noise is of critical concern to WDM-based ONoCs: in the worst case, the crosstalk noise power exceeds the signal power in all three WDM-based ONoC architectures, even when the number of processor cores is small, e.g., 64.

The three-dimensional Network-on-Chips (3D NoCs) has become a mature multi-core interconnection architecture in recent years. However, the traditional electrical lines have very limited bandwidth and high energy consumption, making the photonic interconnection promising for future 3D Optical NoCs (ONoCs). Since existing solutions cannot well guarantee the fault-tolerant ability of 3D ONoCs, in this paper, we propose a reliable optical router (OR) structure which sacrifices less redundancy to obtain more restore paths. Moreover, by using our fault-tolerant routing algorithm, the restore path can be found inside the disabled OR under the deadlock-free condition, i.e., fault-node reuse. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the previous related works by maximum 81.1 percent and 33.0 percent on average for throughput performance under different synthetic and real traffic patterns. It can improve the system average optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) performance by maximum 26.92 percent and 12.57 percent on average, and it can improve the average energy consumption performance by 0.3 percent to 15.2 percent under different topology types/sizes, failure rates, OR structures, and payload packet sizes.

Microresonators have been utilized to construct optical interconnection networks. One of the drawbacks of these microresonators is that they suffer from intrinsic crosstalk noise and power loss, resulting in Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) reduction and system performance degradation at the network level. The novel contribution of this paper is to systematically study the worst-case crosstalk noise and SNR in a ring-based ONoC, the Corona. In the paper, Corona's data channel and broadcast bus are investigated, with formal general analytical models presented at the device and network levels. Leveraging our detailed analytical models, we present quantitative simulations of the worst-case power loss, crosstalk noise, and SNR in Corona. Moreover, we compare the worst-case results in Corona with those in mesh-based and folded-torus-based ONoCs, all of which consist of the same number of cores as Corona. The quantitative results demonstrate the damaging impact of crosstalk noise and power loss in Corona: the worst-case SNR is roughly 14.0 dB in the network, while the worst-case power loss is substantially high at -69.3 dB in the data channel.

Energy-efficiency is becoming increasingly important to modern computing systems with multi-/many-core architectures. Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), as an effective low-power technique, has been widely applied to improve energy-efficiency in commercial multi-core systems. However, due to the large number of cores and growing complexity of emerging applications, it is difficult to efficiently find a globally optimized voltage/frequency assignment at runtime. In order to improve the energy-efficiency for the overall multicore system, we propose an online DVFS control strategy based on core-level Modular Reinforcement Learning (MRL) to adaptively select appropriate operating frequencies for each individual core. Instead of focusing solely on the local core conditions, MRL is able to make comprehensive decisions by considering the running-states of multiple cores without incurring exponential memory cost which is necessary in traditional Monolithic Reinforcement Learning (RL). Experimental results on various realistic applications and different system scales show that the proposed approach improves up to 28% energy-efficiency compared to the recent individual-RL approach.

Recently, interchip/intrachip optical interconnection networks have been proposed for ultrahigh-bandwidth and low-latency communications. These networks employ the microresonators (MRs) to modulate, direct, or detect the optical signal. However, utilized MRs suffer from intrinsic crosstalk noise and signal power loss, degrading the network efficiency via the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The amount of crosstalk noise and signal power loss may differ from network to network. Hence, there exists a need to systematically analyze the effect of the crosstalk noise and the power loss issues. In this paper, we have developed the analytical models considering both coherent and incoherent crosstalk for both the interchip and intrachip optical networks. The interchip/intrachip optical interconnection networks—the $\text{I}^{2}$ CON—are analyzed as a case study. The quantitative results on the individual networks have demonstrated that the architectural design determines the impact of crosstalk on the SNR. We have also demonstrated that the optical interconnection networks with interchip/intrachip interconnects result in better bit error rate (BER) compared with that of only intrachip interconnect. Our analyses of the worst case can be utilized as a platform to compare the realistic performance among different optical interconnection networks via the degradation of SNR/BER and data bandwidth.