DLPS: Dynamic laser power scaling for optical Network-on-Chip

Optical Network-on-Chip (NoC), offering the advantages of low energy consumption, high bandwidth, and low latency, is a promising solution for on-chip communications of multi-core systems. However, on-chip lasers, a key element in optical NoCs, are a dominant source of power consumption. In this paper, we propose dynamic laser power scaling (DLPS), a fine-grained control strategy for minimizing laser power consumption while meeting the communication bandwidth required for the application. The proposed DLPS strategy intelligently switches among multiple operation modes based on the communication traffic pattern. Our experiments show that by introducing two new modes (standby, and intermediate data rate), DLPS can further reduce the communication energy for communication-intensive applications, compared to a simple on-off control strategy that dynamically turns lasers either completely on or off.