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Silicon photonics enables the fabrication of photonic integrated circuits with high bandwidth density, making it suitable for computercom applications. In multicore computing systems, the communications between cores and memory can be supported by optical networks-on-chip (NoC) realized with photonic integrated circuits (PIC). While different optical NoC topologies have been proposed in the past, only fewNoC were fabricated and tested. This paper aims at comparing the performance of two PIC NoC with a bus and a ring topology.

The operation of an integrated silicon-photonics multi-microring network-on-chip (NoC) is experimentally demonstrated in terms of transmission spectra and bit error rates at 10 Gb/s. The integrated NoC consists of 8 thermally tuned microrings coupled to a central ring. The switching functionalities are tested with concurrent transmissions at both the same and different wavelengths. Experimental results validate the analytical model based on the transfer matrix method. BER measurements