TriHOT: Triangular and Hexagonal Norm Based Timing-Driven Optical Routing with Wavelength Division Multiplexing
Journal
ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
Journal Volume
31
Journal Issue
3
Start Page
1
End Page
20
ISSN
1084-4309
1557-7309
Date Issued
2026-02-11
Author(s)
Liang, Jun-Wei
Abstract
As semiconductor technology continues scaling, interconnect delay becomes a major bottleneck for circuit performance. On-chip optical interconnect with wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is a promising alternative due to its high speed, broad bandwidth, and energy efficiency. Previous work estimates the timing of an optical interconnect in terms of L1 or L2 norm and simplifies its timing gain based on a distance threshold. This estimation and simplification cannot capture the essence of optical routing and the impact of WDM, and may cause timing degradation. In this work, we propose a novel timing model based on a unified triangular and hexagonal norm and establish a wirelength lower bound to measure the routing quality. Moreover, we reduce the WDM-aware optical routing to the Maximum Weighted Independent Set (MWIS) problem and approach it by weighted interval scheduling in linear time-space. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of timing, wirelength, and transmission loss with comparable runtime.
Subjects
hexagonal mesh
norm theory
optical routing
Silicon photonics
timing
triangular mesh
wavelength division multiplexing
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Type
journal article