Optical Networking Best Practices Handbook

1.5. OPTICAL NETWORK DESIGN USING COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNIQUES

Execution of one instruction while the next is being decoded is a must for applications addressing the volume and speed needed for high-bandwidth internet connectivity, typified by optical networking schemes such as DWDM that allow each fiber to transmit multiple data streams. The proliferation of optical fibers has given Internet pipes such tremendous capacity that the bottlenecks will be at the (electrically based) routing nodes for quite some time [5].

To build optical networks that satisfy the need for more powerful processing nodes, a new design methodology based on computational intelligence is being used. This powerful methodology offsets the difficulties that designers employing register-transfer-level (RTL) synthesis methodologies encounter in these designs [5].

Computational intelligence generates timing-accurate, gate-level netlists from a higher abstraction level than RTL. These tools read in a functional design description where the microarchitecture doesn not need to be undefined; it is a description of functionality and interface behavior only, not of the detailed design implementation [5].

The description contains no microarchitecture details such as finite state machines, multiplexers, or even registers. At this higher level of abstraction, the amount of code required to describe a given design can be one order of magnitude smaller than that needed to describe the same design in RTL. Hence, ...