Hybrid Network on Chip (HNoC): Local Buses with a Global Mesh Architecture

摘要

Network on chip (NoC) is often implemented with packet-based communication rather than bus connections between cores. Although NoC is a good solution for long-distance communication, local buses are more efficient for short-distance connections. In this paper, we propose a hybrid network on chip (HNoC) fabric that uses local buses for nearest-neighbor communication and the standard NoC topology for global interconnection. Local buses carry all the nearest-neighbor traffic, reducing traffic on the global network, which results in increased throughput and reduced energy consumption.rnBased on a communication probability density (CPD) function derived from Rent's rule, it is shown that in a 25-core chip multiprocessor, HNoC can remove up to 78% of the traffic from the global NoC topology, which results in 4.6x higher throughput and a 58% reduction in energy consumption compared to a conventional NoC topology.