Photonics interconnect technology for chip multiprocessing architectures: the Photonica project

A Network-on-Chip (NoC) is an architectural paradigm where several independent computational cores, physically located on the same chip, can execute multiple concurrent processes, thus exploiting the potentialities of shared computing inside a single VLSI processor. As the number of interconnected cores increases, the needs in terms of communication bandwidth and power consumption grow exponentially, imposing unrealistic constraints for a practical realization. To overcome these limitations, Optical Networks-On-Chip (ONoCs) seem to be a promising solution. The aim of PHOTONICA is to develop a design platform for photonic on-chip interconnections. In this paper some of the main results obtained during the first year of activity are presented.