NoCs are an integral part of modern multicore processors, they must continuously support high-throughput low-latency on-chip data communication under a stringent energy budget when system size scales up. Heterogeneous multicore systems further push the limit of NoC design by integrating cores with diverse performance requirements onto the same die. Traditional packet-switched NoCs, which have the flexibility of connecting diverse computation and storage devices, are facing great challenges to meet the performance requirements within the energy budget due to latency and energy consumption associated with buffering and routing at each router. In this paper, we take advantage of the diversity in performance requirements of on-chip heterogeneous computing devices by designing, implementing, and evaluating a hybrid-switched network that allows the packet-switched and circuit-switched messages to share the same communication fabric by partitioning the network through time-division multiplexing (TDM). In the proposed hybrid-switched network, circuit-switched paths are established along frequently communicating nodes. Our experiments show that utilizing these paths can improve system performance by reducing communication latency and alleviating network congestion. Furthermore, better energy efficiency is achieved by reducing buffering in routers and in turn enabling aggressive power gating.
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