Adaptive Tuning of Photonic Devices in a Photonic NoC Through Dynamic Workload Allocation

Photonic network-on-chip (PNoC) is a promising candidate to replace traditional electrical NoC in manycore systems that require substantial bandwidths. The photonic links in the PNoC comprise laser sources, optical ring resonators, passive waveguides, and photodetectors. Reliable link operation requires laser sources and ring resonators to have matching optical frequencies. However, inherent thermal sensitivity of photonic devices and manufacturing process variations can lead to a frequency mismatch. To avoid this mismatch, micro-heaters are used for thermal trimming and tuning, which can dissipate a significant amount of power. This paper proposes a novel FreqAlign workload allocation policy, accompanying an adaptive frequency tuning (AFT) policy, that is capable of reducing thermal tuning power of PNoC. FreqAlign uses thread allocation and thread migration to control temperature for matching the optical frequencies of ring resonators in each photonic link. The AFT policy reduces the remaining optical frequency difference among ring resonators and corresponding on-chip laser sources by hardware tuning methods. We use a full modeling stack of a PNoC that includes a performance simulator, a power simulator, and a thermal simulator with a temperature-dependent laser source power model to design and evaluate our proposed policies. Our experimental results demonstrate that FreqAlign reduces the resonant frequency gradient between ring resonators by 50%-60% when compared to existing workload allocation policies. Coupled with AFT, FreqAlign reduces localized thermal tuning power by 19.28 W on average, and is capable of saving up to 34.57 W when running realistic loads in a 256-core system without any performance degradation.