The mesh Network-on-Chip (NoC) topology has its drawbacks in the communication latency scalability, and the concentration of the traffic in the center of the mesh. We propose a topology where a traditional wormhole-routed mesh network is augmented by a hierarchical ring interconnect for routing global traffic. In addition to the topology, the routing strategies have a large impact on system performance. We compare the performance of a deterministic and adaptive routing strategy when applied to our augmented topology. A SystemC modeling platform was used to compare the traditional wormhole-routed mesh with the augmented architecture. The proposed architecture reduces the average latencies incurred by global traffic, while the application of a adaptive routing strategy can further increase performance.
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