CAMON: Low Cost Silicon Photonic Chiplet for Manycore Processors
While many new applications prefer manycore processor with a large number of cores, the exploding communications among multiple cores, caches, and off chip memories is posing a fundamental challenge on manycore designs. Silicon photonics based interconnection network promises high bandwidth, low latency, and high energy efficiency, and can potentially meet the communication requirements of manycore processors. In this paper, we propose CAMON, a small low cost silicon photonic chiplet integrated into the manycore processor package. CAMON chiplet can effectively alleviate the communication bottlenecks of manycore processors and improve the energy efficiency of data movement, especially for large scale systems. We develop a distributed arbitration system, a low power low latency optical interface, and an off chip laser preactivation mechanism for CAMON. The experimental results show that compared with the electrical network, CAMON can improve the full system performance per energy by <inline formula> <tex math notation="LaTeX"$4.6\times /tex math>/inline formula> speedup the manycore processor by <inline formula> <tex math notation="LaTeX"$2.7\times /tex math>/inline formula> and save the area of the processor die by 3% in a 512 core system.
IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems