Architectural exploration of optical and electrical interconnects in MPSoC

Abstract

MPSoC interconnect architectures require new design evolution to absorb the high data rate of the future processor evolutions and to absorb the complex data flow of the next application generations. This paper details an interconnect architectural exploration in an MPSoC environment using a multimedia application: a medical imaging. This exploration take into account two opposite interconnect technologies, optical and electrical. Depending on the application and MPSoC architecture, either electrical or optical interconnect can bring significant performance in terms of hit cache ratio and processing time.