Leveraging Optical Technology in Future Bus-based Chip Multiprocessors

Although silicon optical technology is still in its formative stages, and the more near-term application is chip-to-chip communication, rapid advances have been made in the development of on-chip optical interconnects. In this paper, we investigate the integration of CMOS-compatible optical technology to on-chip cache-coherent buses in future CMPs. While not exhaustive, our investigation yields a hierarchical opto-electrical system that exploits the advantages of optical technology while abiding by projected limitations. Our evaluation shows that, for the applications considered, compared to an aggressive all-electrical bus of similar power and area, significant performance improvements can be achieved using an opto-electrical bus. This performance improvement is largely dependent on the application’s bandwidth demand and on the number of implemented wavelengths per optical waveguide. We also present a number of critical areas for future work that we discover in the course of our r...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Nevin Kirman, Meyrem Kirman, Rajeev K. Dokania, José F. Martínez, Alyssa B. Apsel, Matthew A. Watkins, David H. Albonesi
• Keywords: Hardware, MICRO 2006, On-chip Optical Interconnects, Optical Technology, Silicon Optical Technology