Minimally Buffered Router Using Weighted Deflection Routing for Mesh Network on Chip

摘要

The scalability, modularity and massive parallelism exhibited by Network on chip(NoC) interconnectsmake them highly suitable for the inter core communication framework of multiprocessor system-on-chip(MPSoC) designs. Routers play the most vital role in transferring flits through the network, hence efficientmicroarchitecture and cost effective routing algorithms are highly essential for modern NoC routers.Elimination of buffers and deflection routing help to achieve energy and area efficiency of these routers.The advantages of bufferless and buffered designs can be combined by using a minimum number of sidebuffers to store a fraction of deflection flits in the router. In this paper, we propose a routing algorithmbased on weighted deflection of flits for minimally buffered deflection routers. Evaluations on 4x4 and 8x8mesh NoC using synthetic workloads as well as benchmark applications demonstrate that deflection rateand average network latency are significantly reduced in comparison with the state of the art NoC routers.Performance analysis of the newly proposed algorithm shows that the network saturation point improvesby 26% compared to earlier designs in this domain.