HOG-NoC: Hybrid Optical-Electronic Mesh-based Grouped NoC

Hybrid optical-electronic NoC (HONoC) are recently considered as a promising solution to construct the low diameter and high energy efficiency network by introducing nano-photonic technologies. The traditional fully covered HONoC provides both electrical and optical links to all the nodes. Although extremely high bandwidth can be provided, large scale optical links necessitate too many wavelengths and moriorings, thus resulting in large static power. This over provision of bandwidth leads to ultra-low energy efficiency of the whole network. To solve the problem, we proposed hybrid optical-electronic mesh-based grouped NoC (HOG-NoC). HOG-NoC first interconnects the nodes with electrical mesh network, and then groups all the nodes into clusters. Each cluster has one optical interface. The optical nodes are further divided into four groups to decrease the utilized wavelengths and moriorings. Experiments showed that, compared to E-Mesh with 64 nodes under random traffic pattern, HOG-NoC improved throughput by 25.7%, decreased latency by 75% and reduced energy consumption by 12.9%.