Sharif Digital Repository

Coping with the intrinsic limitations of electrical networks-on-chip, optical on-chip interconnect is emerged as a promising paradigm for future high performance multi-core designs. However, optical networks-on-chip (ONoCs) are drastically vulnerable to on-chip thermal fluctuation. Specifically, electrical power consumed by processing cores induces temperature drift, which may cause false paths for optical data communication through the network. Therefore, customizing electrical power distribution throughout the chip plays a critical role for reliable data communication in ONoCs. On the other hand, chip-scale distribution of electrical power is directly affected by mapping various... 

With the growing number of cores, high-performance systems face power challenges due to dominating communication power. Thus, attaining energy efficient high-bandwidth inter-core communication nominates photonic network-on chip as the most promising interconnection paradigm. Although photonic networks pave the way for extremely higher performance communications, their intrinsic susceptibility to thermal fluctuations intimidates reliability of system. This necessitates the development of methodologies to analyze and model thermal effects on network behavior. In this paper, we model temperature fluctuations of optical chips and analyze photonic networks in a holistic approach. We present a... 

Integrated silicon photonic networks have attracted a lot of attention in the recent decades due to their potentials for low-power and high-bandwidth communications. However, these promising networks, as the future technology, are drastically susceptible to thermal fluctuations, which may paralyze wavelength-based operation of these networks. In this regard, precise addressing of thermally induced faults in optical networks-on-chip (ONoCs), as well as revealing practical methods to tackle this challenge will be a break-even point toward implementation of this technology. In this paper, thermal variation is investigated through analyzing on-chip power distribution, which is addressed by power... 

Despite various optical realizations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), optical implementation of nonlinear activation functions and pooling operations are still challenging problems. In this regard, this paper proposes an optical saturable absorption nonlinearity and its atomic-level model, as well as two various optical pooling operations, namely optical average pooling and optical motion pooling, by means of 4f optical correlators. Proposing these optical building blocks not only speed up the neural networks due to negligible optical processing latency, but also facilitate the concatenation of optical convolutional layers with no optoelectrical conversions in-between, as the... 

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are at the heart of several machine learning applications, while they suffer from computational complexity due to their large number of parameters and operations. Recently, all-optical implementation of the CNNs has achieved many attentions, however, the recently proposed optical architectures for CNNs cannot fully utilize the tremendous capabilities of optical processing, due to the required electro-optical conversions in-between successive layers. To implement an all-optical multi-layer CNN, it is essential to optically implement all required operations, namely convolution, summation of channels' output for each convolutional kernel feeding the... 

The classification performance of all-optical Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is greatly influenced by components’ misalignment and translation of input images in the practical applications. In this paper, we propose a free-space all-optical CNN (named Trans-ONN) which accurately classifies translated images in the horizontal, vertical, or diagonal directions. Trans-ONN takes advantages of an optical motion pooling layer which provides the translation invariance property by implementing different optical masks in the Fourier plane for classifying translated test images. Moreover, to enhance the translation invariance property, global average pooling (GAP) is utilized in the Trans-ONN... 

Exponential growth of traffic and bandwidth demands in current data center networks requires low-latency high-throughput interconnection networks, considering power consumption. By considering growth of both multicast and unicast applications, power efficient communication becomes one of the main design challenges in today's data center networks. Addressing these demands, optical networks suggest several benefits as well as circumventing most disadvantages of electrical networks. In this paper, we propose an all-optical scalable architecture, named as OMUX, for communicating intra-data centers. This architecture utilizes passive optical devices and enables optical circuit switching without... 

In electronic computers, extensive amount of computations required for searching biological sequences in big databases leads to vast amount of energy consumption for electrical processing and cooling. On the other hand, optical processing is much faster than electrical counterpart, due to its parallel processing capability, at a fraction of energy consumption level and cost. In this regard, this paper proposes a correlation-based optical algorithm using metamaterial, taking advantages of optical parallel processing, to efficiently locate the edits as a means of DNA sequence comparison. Specifically, the proposed algorithm partitions the read DNA sequence into multiple overlapping intervals,... 

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a precious approach to handle huge number of transistors by virtue of technology scaling to lower than 50nm. Virtual channels have been introduced in order to improve the performance according to a timing multiplexing concept in each physical channel. The incremental effect of virtual channels on power consumption has been shown in literatures. The issue of power saving has always been controversial to many designers. In this paper, we introduce a new technique which tries to adaptively mange the number of virtual channels in order to reduce the power consumption while not degrading the performance of the network without any reconfiguration. Our experimental results... 

NoC is an efficient on-chip communication architecture for SoC architectures. It enables integration of a large number of computational and storage blocks on a single chip. NoCs have tackled the SoCs disadvantages and are scalable. In this paper, we compare two popular NoC topologies, i.e., mesh and torus, in terms of different figures of merit e.g., latency, power consumption, and power/throughput ratio under different routing algorithms and two common traffic models, uniform and hotspot. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in comparing mesh and torus topologies under different routing algorithms and traffic models with respect to their performance and power consumption.... 

This paper presents an optical processing approach for exploring a large number of genome sequences. Specifically, we propose an optical correlator for global alignment and an extended moiré matching technique for local analysis of spatially coded DNA, whose output is fed to a novel three-dimensional artificial neural network for local DNA alignment. All-optical implementation of the proposed 3D artificial neural network is developed and its accuracy is verified in Zemax. Thanks to its parallel processing capability, the proposed structure performs local alignment of 4 million sequences of 150 base pairs in a few seconds, which is much faster than its electrical counterparts, such as the... 

This paper presents a novel optical processing approach for exploring genome sequences built upon an optical correlator for global alignment and the extended dual-vector-curve-curve (DV-curve) method for local alignment. To overcome the problem of the traditional DV-curve method for presenting an accurate and simplified output, we propose the hybrid amplitude wavelength polarization optical DV-curve (HAWPOD) method, built upon the DV-curve method, to analyze genome sequences in three steps: DNA coding, alignment, and post-Analysis. For this purpose, a tunable graphene-based color filter is designed for wavelength modulation of optical signals. Moreover, all-optical implementation of the... 

Nowadays, the accelerated expansion of genetic data challenges speed of current DNA sequence alignment algorithms due to their electrical implementations. Essential needs of an efficient and accurate method for DNA variant discovery demand new approaches for parallel processing in real time. Fortunately, photonics, as an emerging technology in data computing, proposes optical correlation as a fast similarity measurement algorithm; while complexity of existing local alignment algorithms severely limits their applicability. Hence, in this paper, employing optical correlation for global alignment, we present an optical processing approach for local DNA sequence alignment to benefit both... 

In response to the imperfections of current sequence alignment methods, originated from the inherent serialism within their corresponding electrical systems, a few optical approaches for biological data comparison have been proposed recently. However, due to their low performance, raised from their inefficient coding scheme, this paper presents a novel all-optical high-throughput method for aligning DNA, RNA, and protein sequences, named HELIOS. The HELIOS method employs highly sophisticated operations to locate character matches, single or multiple mutations, and single or multiple indels within various biological sequences. On the other hand, the HELIOS optical architecture exploits... 

This paper proposes a new optical network-on-chip which is scalable, low-power and high-performance. We design a centralized all-optical router which takes advantage of wavelength based structures. Our design achieves fully contention-free operation by utilizing path-based algorithms. By merging primary photonic switches and utilizing WDM technique, we mitigated the number of basic switching elements and thus reduced the consumed power down to 47.37% in comparison with the most prominent structure introduced for wavelength routing; i.e., the λ-Router. We obtained this superiority while maintaining the performance as high as the previous structures, which yields in energy savings. Moreover,... 

The ever-expanding growth of internet traffic enforces deployment of massive Data Center Networks (DCNs) supporting high performance communications. Optical switching is being studied as a promising approach to fulfill the surging requirements of large scale data centers. The tree-based optical topology limits the scalability of the interconnected network due to the limitations in the port count of optical switches and the lack of optical buffers. Alternatively, buffer-less Fast Optical Switch (FOS) was proposed to realize the nanosecond switching of optical DCNs. Although FOSs provide nanosecond optical switching, they still suffer from port count limitations to scale the DCN. To address... 

Optical networks-on-chip are introduced as an alternative for electrical interconnects in many-core systems, due to their low delay and power consumptions, as well as their high bandwidths. Despite these advantages, physical characteristics of the photonic components are highly sensitive to thermal variations, which results in optical data misrouting through the optical networks at the presence of temperature fluctuation. In this paper, we propose a thermally-resilient all-optical communication approach which improves reliability, as well as performance of the optical networks. For this purpose, we take advantages of auxiliary waveguides and a novel wavelength assignment approach to avoid... 

Two main sources for power dissipation in parallel buses are data transitions on each wire and coupling between adjacent wires. So far, many techniques have been proposed for reducing the self and coupling powers. Most of these methods utilize one (or more) control bit(s) to manage the behavior of data transitions on the parallel bus. In this paper, we propose a new coding scheme, referred to as GPH, to reduce power dissipation of these control bits. GPH coding scheme employs partitioned Bus Invert and Odd Even Bus-Invert coding techniques. This method benefits from Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to efficiently partition the bus. In order to reduce self and coupling powers of... 

Two main sources for power dissipation in parallel buses are data transitions on each wire and coupling between adjacent wires. There are many techniques for reducing the transition and coupling powers. These methods utilize extra control bits to manage the behavior of data transitions on parallel bus. In this paper, we propose a new coding scheme which tries to reduce power dissipation of control bits. The proposed method employs partitioned Bus Invert and Odd Even Bus Invert coding techniques. This method benefits from Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to efficiently partition the bus. In order to reduce transition and coupling power of control bits, it finds partitions with... 

We propose a new optical reconfigurable Network-on-Chip (NoC), named ReFaT ONoC (Reconfigurable Flat and Tree Optical NoC). ReFaT is a dynamically reconfigurable architecture, which customizes the topology and routing paths based on the application characteristics. ReFaT, as an all-optical NoC, routes optical packets based on their wavelengths. For this purpose, we propose a novel architecture for the optical switch, which eliminates the need for optical resource reservation, and thus avoids the corresponding latency and area overheads. As a key idea for dynamic reconfiguration, each application is mapped to a specific set of wavelengths and utilizes its dedicated routing algorithm. We...