Fault-tolerant photonic network-on-chip

Photonic Networks-on-Chip (PNoCs) promise significant advantages over their electronic counterparts. In particular, they offer a potentially disruptive technology solution with fundamentally low power dissipation that remains independent of capacity while providing ultra-high throughput and minimal access latency. However, the major optical device in PNoC systems, microring resonators (MRs), are very sensitive to temperature fluctuation and manufacturing errors. A single MR failure may cause messages to be misdelivered or lost, which results in bandwidth loss or even complete failure of the whole system. This chapter describes a fault-tolerant PNoC architecture. The system is based on a fault-tolerant path-configuration and routing algorithm, a microring fault-resilient photonic router, and uses minimal redundancy to assure accuracy of the packet transmission even after faultyMRs are detected.