Run-time laser power management in photonic NoCs with on-chip semiconductor optical amplifiers

摘要

Photonic network-on-chip (PNoC) architectures are projected to achieve very high bandwidth with relatively small data-dependent energy consumption compared to their electrical counterparts. However, PNoC architectures require a non-trivial amount of static laser power, which can offset most of the bandwidth and energy benefits. In this paper, we present a novel low-overhead technique for run-time management of laser power in PNoCs, which makes use of on-chip semiconductor amplifiers (SOA) to achieve traffic-independent and loss-aware savings in laser power consumption. Experimental analysis shows that our technique achieves 31.5% more laser power savings with 12.8% less latency overhead compared to another laser power management scheme from prior work.