2-D torus inter-chip network on EOPCB for locally intensive communication

A star-based two-dimensional (2-D) torus inter-chip network on electro-optical printed circuit board (EOPCB) is proposed to provide a simple and effective interconnection solution for such a real-time distributed parallel systems as satellite image processing, which is characterized with locally intensive communication. The proposed hybrid interconnection network has a hierarchical structure where the higher level is a 2-D torus network of 8 x 8 optical cross-connects (OXCs) and the lower level is a cluster of processors connected in star topology using 4 x 4 OXCs. EOPCB is used to eliminate the electrical bottleneck of high speed interconnection on board. OXCs are used to eliminate the expensive E/O/E conversion of electrical routers and provide a transparent optical channel between processors. A new approach based on combination network is proposed to construct 4 x 4 and 8 x 8 OXCs with 2 x 2 optical crossbars.