Sharif Digital Repository

Topology is an important network attribute that greatly affects the power, performance, cost, and design time/effort of NoCs. In this paper, we propose a novel NoC architecture that can exploit the benefits of both application-specific and regular NoC topologies. To this end, a subset of NoC links bypass the router pipeline stages and directly connect remotely located nodes. This results in an NoC which holds both fixed connections between adjacent nodes and long connections virtually connecting non-adjacent nodes. These shortcut paths are constructed at run-time by employing a simple and fast mechanism composed of two processes: on-chip traffic monitoring and path reconfiguration. The... 

Abstract Reducing the NoC power is critical for scaling up the number of nodes in future many-core systems. Most NoC designs adopt packet-switching to benefit from its high throughput and excellent scalability. These benefits, however, come at the price of the power consumption and latency overheads of routers. Circuit-switching, on the other hand, enjoys a significant reduction in power and latency of communication by directing data over pre-established circuits, but the relatively large circuit setup time and low resource utilization of this switching mechanism is often prohibitive. In this paper, we address one of the major problems of circuit-switching, i.e. the circuit setup time...