LAUSR

Optical Networks-on-Chip (ONoCs) have been proposed as the most promising solution for on-chip multi-core processors interconnection infrastructure due to its low latency, low power dissipation, and high bandwidth density. In ONoCs, the mesh topology is a typical structure that is regarded as the one of the most primary choice in ONoCs design due to its regular structure, simplicity, and divinable scalability in terms of network performance and budget. However, mesh structure has low connectivity and high insertion loss and crosstalk noise, which severely reduce the energy efficiency and signal reliability. In this paper, we first propose a novel double-layer ONoCs structure based on a partition of Virtual-Cluster in mesh, named VCmesh, which contains two candidate communication modes: inter-cluster communication and non-cluster communication. Furthermore, we design the length-optimized-routing-protocol (LORP) to select the preferred with smaller number of hops. The analyses and simulation results indicate that the performance of the VCmesh network is better than that of the typical mesh structure, especially in terms of end-to-end (ETE) latency and throughput. In physical layer performance, the VCmesh has a higher signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR), which improves the transmission quality of the optical signal. In addition, compared with the typical mesh-based ONoCs, the VCmesh-based ONoCs reduce the minimum required laser output power for 16 nodes, 25 nodes, and 36 nodes by 52.4%, 85.6%, and 94.6%, respectively.