Parallel-XY: A Novel Loss-Aware Non-Blocking Photonic Router for Silicon Nano-Photonic Networks-on-Chip

Photonic technology is now recognized as a promising platform among the existing solutions to the challenges facing interconnection networks in current chips. Recent progresses in silicon nanophotonic technologies have provided an adequate infrastructure to construct photonic communication links with higher bandwidths and power efficiency in comparison with the traditional electrical communications. Router is a core component in photonic networks-on-chip. This paper proposes a 5 × 5 non-blocking photonic router which is designed for XY routing algorithm. The simulation results show that our proposed router achieves significant improvements in terms of insertion loss owing to reduction in number of the waveguide crossings. These improvements leveraging wavelength-division-multiplexing lead to obtain higher bandwidth density.