GenStar: a generic construction method for scalable and efficient wavelength-routed optical networks-on-chip

As the scale of many-core processors continues to increase, optical networks-on-chip (ONoCs) are facing increasingly stringent challenges in terms of bandwidth density, energy efficiency, and scalability. Wavelength-routed optical networks-on-chip (WRONoCs) have emerged as a promising solution due to their high bandwidth and low latency characteristics. However, existing WRONoC architectures often suffer from rapid growth in the number of microring resonators (MRRs) and wavelength resource requirements as network scale increases, resulting in significant hardware overhead and insertion loss. To address these issues, this paper proposes a generalized construction method for WRONoCs, named GenStar, which enables the construction of scalable WRONoCs through a unified topology construction approach and a heuristic wavelength reuse strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with existing WRONoC schemes, GenStar effectively reduces the MRR count while maintaining a comparable wavelength count, and achieves lower insertion loss, bit error rate, and laser power consumption, together with an improved signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method provides a general and efficient solution for scalable optical interconnect design and shows broad application prospects.