Enabling quality-of-service in nanophotonic network-on-chip

With the recent development in silicon photonics, researchers have developed optical network-on-chip (NoC) architectures that achieve both low latency and low power, which are beneficial for future large scale chip-multiprocessors (CMPs). However, none of the existing optical NoC architectures has quality-of-service (QoS) support, which is a desired feature of an efficient interconnection network. QoS support provides contending flows with differentiated bandwidths according to their priorities (or weights), which is crucial to account for application-specific communication patterns and provides bandwidth guarantees for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a quality-of-service framework for optical network-on-chip based on frame-based arbitration. We show that the proposed approach achieves excellent differentiated bandwidth allocation with only simple hardware additions and low performance overheads. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that provides QoS support for optical network-on-chip.