A Backup Resource Customization and Allocation Method for Wavelength-Routed Optical Networks-on-Chip Topologies

Zhidan Zheng, You-Jen Chang, Liaoyuan Cheng, Tsun-Ming Tseng, Ulf Schlichtmann

Abstract: Wavelength-routed networks-on-chip (WRONoCs) are known for providing high-speed and low-power communication. Despite those advantages, the key components, microring resonators (MRRs), are prone to process and thermal variations, which cause signals to fail to reach their intended destinations. Thus, several WRONoC fault-tolerant methods propose to prepare a constant number of backups, which often leads to inefficient resource allocation, i.e. insufficient backups for the signals that are prone to errors, while more than enough backups for the signals that are barely affected, resulting in much power waste. In this work, we propose a dynamical backup resource allocation method for reliability maximization and power minimization in WRONoCs. Precisely, our method starts with accurately modeling the WRONoC faults, which considers the deviation of an MRR's default behavior as a Gaussian Distribution. Since signal paths consist of different numbers of MRRs, and the signals have different probabilities of deviating from their designated paths, our method customizes the number of backup paths for every signal and automatically allocates the minimum resources to optimize the reliability.