A Thermal-Aware Power Allocation Method for Optical Network-on-Chip

Optical network on chip (ONoC) is a promising on-chip communication architecture for future many-core systems due to its high performance and energy efficient. ONoC is mostly constructed with microring resonators. However, thermo-optic effect will lead to the drift of the operation point and ultimately have a serious impact on the signal-to-noise rate (SNR). In order to solve this problem, a thermal-aware power allocation method is proposed in this paper. Every communication request should be provided with enough power to satisfy the minimum SNR requirement. Time division multiplexing technology is adopted to solve the power allocation conflicts and communication path conflicts in the network. In order to minimize the number of slots satisfying the rated power supply, an optimization model is established and solved. The simulation results indicate that our proposed method can increase the success rate of communication requests from an average of 43% to 100% in four different on-chip thermal distribution scenarios when compared with four communication scenarios without optimization. It also saves 66.7% of the laser power in average compared with the traditional power allocation method.