A Method for Router Table Compression for Application Specific Routing in Mesh Topology NoC Architectures

摘要

One way to specialize a general purpose multi-core chip built using NoC principles is to provide a mechanism to configure an application specific deadlock free routing algorithm in the underlying communication network. A table in every router, implemented using a writable memory, can provide a possibility of specializing the routing algorithm according to the application requirements. In such an implementation the cost (area) of the router will be proportional to the size of the routing table. In this paper, we propose a method to compress the routing table to reduce its size such that the resulting routing algorithm remains deadlock free as well as has high adaptivity. We demonstrate through simulation based evaluation that our application specific routing algorithm gives much higher performance, in terms of latency and throughput, as compared to general purpose algorithms for deadlock free routing. We also show that a table size of two entries for each output port gives performance within 3% of the uncompressed table.