US Patent 9369784 Optical arbitration device and method in a network-on-chip system

An optical arbiter device, between conflicting access requests to a shared resource sent by N processing nodes of a network-on-chip system, comprising at least one primary optical arbiter bus, at least one optical source for transmitting a first optical signal in said at least one primary optical arbiter bus, and a sequence of N optical arbiter cells coupled with the primary optical arbiter bus, each of these optical arbiter cells being associated with a processing node and having means for selecting the processing node with which said each optical arbiter cell is associated by re-routing the first optical signal. The optical source is designed to transmit a second optical signal propagated in an opposite direction to the first optical signal along the primary optical arbiter bus. Furthermore, the selection means of each optical arbiter cell are designed to perform said selection by re-routing the first and second optical signals.