IEEE Trans. Sustainable Comput. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8423087 (2018)

An interconnect is the physical link that enables communication between chips. The most common interconnect technology is based on metallic wiring. However, the performance of metallic interconnects, with respect to power consumption and communication delay, does not improve with down-scaling. Thus, traditional metallic interconnects may not be ideal for deeply scaled, highly complex chip architectures such as many-core chip multiprocessors. Unconventional interconnect technologies based on optics or wireless communication could offer a power-efficient and more scalable alternative for on-chip communication.

Avinash Karanth and colleagues have previously developed an optical and wireless on-chip network, termed OWN, that utilizes optical interconnects for short distances and wireless interconnects for long distances. Building on this previous work, the researchers — who are based at Ohio University, George Washington University and the University of Arizona — have now augmented OWN to include wireless links that can be reconfigured during operation in a new architecture they call R-OWN. Their modification allows traffic from over-utilized channels to be reallocated to under-utilized channels dynamically. The ability to reconfigure during runtime leads to an improvement in performance in their new architecture compared to their previous architecture, though this comes at a cost of higher energy consumption.