Express Ring: a multi-layer and non-blocking NoC architecture

IEICE Electronics Express

Peng Wang¹  Chen Li¹  Yang Guo¹  Shenggang Chen¹  Sheng Ma¹ 

[1] College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology

关键词: NoC;    Ring;    multi-layer;    non-blocking;    global signal;   

DOI  :  10.1587/elex.12.20141190

学科分类：电子、光学、磁材料

来源: Denshi Jouhou Tsuushin Gakkai

【 摘 要 】

References(14)As the Network-on-Chip (NoC) induces significant hardware overheads, it becomes the performance and scalability bottleneck of System-on-Chip (SoC) design. To address this challenge, we propose a multi-layer, non-blocking ring NoC architecture. Multi-layer links with different bandwidth achieve high link utilization and avoid protocol-level deadlock. The non-blocking architecture leverages bufferless router to reduce hardware overheads and simplifies router pipeline to reduce zero-load latency. We also propose a scalable global signal control mechanism to eliminate the starvation and avoid the loss of packets. Compared with the conventional ring network composed of dateline routers (DRing) and Intel Nehalem-EX ring network (NRing), our design achieves 69.4% and 12.3% performance improvements, respectively. Compared with DRing, it also reduces hardware overheads.

【 授权许可】

Unknown