Reconfigurable Silicon Photonic Interconnect for Many-Core Architecture

In the context of declining Moore and Dennard Laws, efficient utilization of chip area and transistor is more than ever required. The portion of transistors devoted to compute operations can be maximized by off-loading as much as possible data-storage onto memory chips. This, however, requires wide off-chip IO bandwidth, and furthermore increases Network-on-chip (NoC) traffic. In this paper, we first present a concept of optically connected memory modules, delivering enough bandwidth to allow for cache reduction and memory externalization. Second, we show that connecting these memory modules in a reconfigurable interconnect permit to substantially offload NoC traffic.