A LOW-CROSSTALK, WAVELENGTH-EFFICIENT 5×5 NON-BLOCKING OPTICAL ROUTER FOR SCALABLE ONoC ARCHITECTURES WITH ANALYTICAL LOSS MODELING

The increasing communication demands in many-core systems have accelerated the adoption of Optical Networks-on-Chip (ONoCs) as a high-bandwidth and low-latency interconnect paradigm. Among various components, the optical router plays a critical role in determining overall network performance, particularly in terms of insertion loss, crosstalk, and hardware complexity. In this work, a resource-efficient 5×5 non-blocking optical router based on microring resonators (MRs) is proposed and analyzed. The proposed architecture employs 16 microring resonators and 12 waveguide crossings without the use of waveguide terminators, enabling a compact and low-complexity design. Unlike conventional approaches that prioritize a single performance metric, the presented router is developed with a balanced design objective that considers insertion loss, crosstalk, and resource utilization simultaneously. The routing paths are configured such that only the required microrings are activated for a given input–output connection, allowing variable microring engagement across different paths and thereby reducing unnecessary switching losses. A detailed performance evaluation is carried out using the PhoNoCMap simulation framework. The results indicate that the proposed router achieves a minimum insertion loss of 0.12 dB, a maximum insertion loss of 1.15 dB, and an average insertion loss of 0.783 dB, while maintaining acceptable crosstalk levels. These results demonstrate that the proposed design achieves competitive performance while utilizing fewer resources compared to several existing router architectures.