A power estimation method for mesh-based photonic NoC routing algorithms

Future applications running on many-core processors with tens to hundreds of cores on a chip will require an efficient inter-core communication strategy to achieve high performance. Photonic Networks-on-Chip (PNoCs) have emerged as a promising alternative to the conventional metal based networks-on-chip due to their advantages in bandwidth density, power efficiency and propagation speed. However, photonic networks-on-chip (PNoCs) are drastically vulnerable to on-chip thermal fluctuation which affects the proper functionality of the photonic components. In this paper, we present a power estimation scheme for the optical layer of PNoCs. We used various types of traffic to estimate the power. This is to be used for routing decisions, and has to be calculated in real-time.