Universal method for designing non-blocking multicast-supported on chip optical router

Abstract

Optical routers constructed by waveguides and microring resonators (MRs) play an important role for realizing non-blocking multicastsupported communication of Optical Networks-on-Chip (ONoCs). Most of the prior methods use building blocks to construct optical routers that cannot support multicast communication. Some prior optical routers support multicast communication by using large number of MRs with low utilization. In this letter, a universal method for designing non-blocking multicast-supported optical routers is proposed. Given the topology of the router that satisfies some conditions, this proposed method leverages broadband MRs and perform recursion pruning algorithm to obtain a multicast-supported router design with fewer MRs and high utilization. Based on this method, a five-port non-blocking multicast-supported optical router is designed. It saves up to 73.3% MRs and enhances 100% of the utilization compared with previous reported five-port routers.