OREX: An Optical Ring with Electrical Crossbar Hybrid Photonic Network-on-Chip

The role of network-on-chip (NoC) is becoming more important as the number of processing elements (PE) integration onto a single chip increases. Lowering power consumption while providing capability of high-performance communication is a challenging problem for the design of future NoCs. In this paper we propose OREX, which is a hybrid NoC consisting of an optical ring and an electrical crossbar central router. OREX takes advantage of both electrical and optical technology designs state-of-art to deliver a high data rate transfer NoC at an acceptable power consumption cost. Using a cycle accurate simulator, we evaluate the proposed hybrid NoC. Simulation experiment shows that OREX presents slightly better communication performance in terms of bandwidth and power consumption compare to a conventional hybrid photonic torus network.