Compared with the traditional and inter-chip networks, on-chip networks (NoCs) have enormous wire resources which can be traded for improving other performance requirements. This means that much wider data links can be used for NoCs. This paper focuses on the area costs for on-chip routers under four different data-link widths: 8 bits, 16 bits, 128 bits, and 256 bits. Firstly, a virtual-channel based on-chip router is introduced. Secondly, the components of the router are implemented by Verilog HDL models and synthesized by Quartus II 4.0 in a FPGA device. Finally, the area costs are analyzed. It can be seen from the results that data-link width has great influence on area costs of buffers and crossbar while has no influence on area costs of arbiter.
展开▼
