Formal Worst-Case Analysis of Crosstalk Noise in Mesh-Based Optical Networks-on-Chip

Crosstalk noise is an intrinsic characteristic as well as a potential issue of photonic devices. In large scale optical networks-on-chips (ONoCs), crosstalk noise could cause severe performance degradation and prevent ONoC from communicating properly. The novel contribution of this paper is the systematical modeling and analysis of the crosstalk noise and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of optical routers and mesh-based ONoCs using a formal method. Formal analytical models for the worst-case crosstalk noise and minimum SNR in mesh-based ONoCs are presented. The crosstalk analysis is performed at device, router, and network levels. A general 5 x 5 optical router model is proposed for router level analysis. The minimum SNR optical link candidates, which constrain the scalability of mesh-based ONoCs, are identified. It is also shown that symmetric mesh-based ONoCs have the best SNR performance. The presented formal analyses can be easily applied to other optical routers and mesh-based ONoCs. Finally, we present case studies of mesh-based ONoCs using the optimized crossbar and Crux optical routers to evaluate the proposed formal method. We find that crosstalk noise can significantly limit the scalability of mesh-based ONoCs. For example, when the mesh-based ONoC size, using optimized crossbar, is larger than 8 x 8, the optical signal power is smaller than the crosstalk noise power; when the network size is 16 x 16 and the input power is 0 dBm, in the worst-case, the signal power is -24.9 dBm and the crosstalk noise power is -11 dBm.