Universal Method for Constructing the On-Chip Optical Router with Wavelength Routing Technology

Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC) outperforms the traditional electrical NoC with higher bandwidth density, lower power consumption, and better scalability. It has emerged as a promising candidate for future on-chip interconnects. In this article, we propose a universal method for designing microring resonator (MR)-based non-blocking optical router, namely LACE, that can be easily integrated into the ONoC with different network requirements. By embracing the Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technique, LACE can implement non-blocking interconnection between different ports. The experimental results show that LACE has lower area cost and lower insertion loss compared with other alternatives. The four-port LACE composed of six MRs is also be demonstrated.