A hybrid packet-circuit switched router for optical network on chip

The increasing number of Intellectual Property (IP) cores challenges the traditional electrical Network on Chip (NoC). Silicon nanophotonics becomes a leading technology because of offering several benefits for NoC. Also, On-chip services, including guaranteed service and best-effort service, have different traffic characteristics. This has an important influence on the performance of NoC. This paper proposes a hybrid packet-circuit switched router for optical Network on Chip (ONoC). It can support optical circuit switching (OCS) and optical packet switching (OPS) in parallel and simultaneously, in order to optimize the performance of the network with both services. According to the simulation results, the proposed architecture achieves lower latency and higher throughput than the traditional architectures in the same network scale. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.