Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, we propose a packet-switched network-on-chip (NoC) architecture which can provide a number of low-power, low-latency virtual point-to-point connections for communication flows. The work aims to improve the power and performance metrics of packet-switched NoC architectures and benefits from the power and resource utilization advantages of NoCs and superior communication performance of point-to-point dedicated links. The virtual point-to-point connections are set up by bypassing the entire router pipeline stages of the intermediate nodes. This work addresses constructing the virtual point-to-point connections at run-time using a light-weight setup network. It involves monitoring... 

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) play an important role in the performance of Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs). Providing the desired performance under heavy traffics imposed by some applications necessitates NoC routers to have a large number of Virtual Channels (VCs). Increasing the number of VCs, however, will add to the delay of the critical path of the arbitration logic, and hence restricts the clock frequency of the router. In order to make it possible to enjoy the benefits of having many VCs and keep the clock frequency as high as that of a low-VC router, we propose Parallel Pseudo-Round-Robin (P2R2) arbiter. Our proposal is based on processing multiple groups of requests in parallel. Our... 

This paper proposes two-dimensional directed graphs (or digraphs for short) as a promising alternative to the popular 2D mesh topology for networks-onchip (NoCs). Mesh is the most popular topology for the NoCs, mainly due to its suitability for on-chip implementation and low cost. However, the fact that a digraph offers a lower diameter than its equivalent linear array of equal cost motivated us to evaluate digraphs as the underlying topology of NoCs. This paper introduces a family of NoC topologies based on three well-known digraphs, namely de Bruijn, shuffleexchange, and Kautz. We study topological properties of the proposed topologies. We show that the proposed digraph-based topologies... 

End-to-end delay, throughput, energy consumption, and silicon area are the most important design metrics of networks-on-chip (NoCs). Although several analytical models have been previously proposed for predicting such metrics in NoCs, very few of them consider the effect of message waiting time in the buffers of network routers for predicting overall power consumptions and none of them consider structural heterogeneity of network routers. This paper introduces two inter-related analytical models to compute message latency and power consumption of NoCs with arbitrary topology, buffering structure, and routing algorithm. Buffer allocation scheme defines the buffering space for each individual... 

In this paper, a 2D shuffle-exchange based mesh topology, or 2D shuffle-exchange mesh (SEM) for short, is presented for network-on-chips. The proposed 2D topology applies the conventional well-known shuffle-exchange structure in each row and each column of the network. Compared to an equal sized mesh which is the most common topology in on-chip networks, the proposed shuffle-exchange based mesh network has smaller diameter but for an equal cost. Finally for better performance cross-shuffle is proposed. Simulation results show that the 2D SEM and 2D cross-shuffle effectively reduce the power consumption and improve performance metrics of the on-chip networks compared to the conventional mesh... 

In this paper, we aim to improve the performance and power metrics of packet-switched network-on-chips (NoCs) and benefits from the scalability and resource utilization advantages of NoCs and superior communication performance of point-to-point dedicated links. The proposed method sets up the virtual point-to-point (VIP) connections over one virtual channel (which bypasses the entire router pipeline) at each physical channel of the NoC. We present two schemes for constructing such VIP circuits. In the first scheme, the circuits are constructed for an application based on its task-graph at design time. The second scheme addresses constructing the connections at run-time using a light-weight... 

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) play an important role in the performance of Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs). Providing the desired performance under heavy traffics imposed by some applications necessitates NoC routers to have a large number of Virtual Channels (VCs). Increasing the number of VCs, however, will add to the delay of the critical path of the arbitration logic, and hence restricts the clock frequency of the router. In order to make it possible to enjoy the benefits of having many VCs and keep the clock frequency as high as that of a low-VC router, we propose Parallel Pseudo-Round-Robin (P2R2) arbiter. Our proposal is based on processing multiple groups of requests in parallel. Our... 

This paper proposes an efficient crosstalk mitigation method for Network-on-Chips. This method uses the binary-reflected Gray coding to send the proper code word into a channel. As the Gray code has reflective and unit distance properties, based on these facts, content of every flit is selected so that to minimize the number of forbidden transition patterns in the channel. A VHDL-based simulation is carried out for several channel widths. Simulation results show that the proposed method reduces the forbidden transitions up to 26% and can save power in NoC links  

This paper proposes a nanophotonic Network-on-Chip architecture based on the traditional Cube-Connected Cycles topology (CCC), which is named as ONC3. We also suggest a contention-free quasi-Dimension-Order-Routing algorithm for the proposed structure. Compared to the previous 2D layouts, our novel scheme lessens the crosstalk parameter of the insertion loss and consequently, the power consumption. Besides, the router structure is area-efficient. On the other hand, optical destination checking supersedes electrical resource reservation, with utilizing passive wavelength routing method and Wavelength Division Multiplexing scheme, simultaneously. The efficiency of the proposed architecture, in... 

Networks on chip (NoC) have been proposed as a solution to mitigate complex on-chip communication problems. NoCs are composed of intellectual properties (IP) which are interconnected by on-chip switching fabrics. A step in the design process of NoCs is hardware virtualization which is mapping the IP cores onto the tiles of a chip. The communication among the IP cores greatly affects the performance and power consumption of NoCs which itself is deeply related to the placement of IPs onto the tiles of the network. Different mapping algorithms have been proposed for NoCs which allocate a set of IPs to given network topologies. In these mapping algorithms, there is a restriction which limits IPs... 

This paper proposes a power-efficient flow-control method to tackle the problem of crosstalk faults in Network-on-Chips (NoCs). The method, called FRR (Flit Reordering/Rotation), combines three coding mechanisms to entirely eliminate opposite direction transitions (OD transitions) as the source of crosstalk faults in NoC communication channels. The first mechanism, called flit-reordering, reorders flits of every packet to find a flit sequence which produces the lowest number of OD transitions on NoC channels. The second mechanism called flit-rotation, logically rotates the content of every flit of the packet with respect to previously sent flit to achieve even more reduction in the number of... 

This paper proposes an efficient mechanism that mitigates crosstalk faults in Network-on-Chips (NoCs). This is done by using a Packet Manipulating mechanism called PAM for reliable data transfer of NoCs. PAM investigates the transitions of a packet to minimize the forbidden transition patterns appearing during the flit traversal in NoCs. To do this, the content of a packet is manipulated using three different manipulating mechanisms. In other words, PAM manipulates the content of packet in three manipulating modes including: vertical, horizontal and diagonal modes. Then, comparing the transitions of these manipulating mechanisms, a packet with minimum numbers of transitions is selected to be... 

This paper presents a reconfigurable network-on-chip (NoC) for many-core chip multiprocessors (CMPs) in the dark silicon era, where a considerable part of high-end chips cannot be powered up due to the power and bandwidth walls. Core specialization, which trades off the cheaper silicon area with energy-efficiency, is a promising solution to the dark silicon challenge. This approach integrates a selection of many diverse application-specific cores into a single many-core chip. Each application then activates those cores that best match its processing requirements. Since active cores may not always form a contiguous active region in the chip, such a partially active many-core CMP requires some... 

Abstract Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) play an important role in the performance of Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs). Providing the desired performance under heavy traffics imposed by some applications necessitates NoC routers to have a large number of Virtual Channels (VCs). Increasing the number of VCs, however, will add to the delay of the critical path of the arbitration logic, and hence restricts the clock frequency of the router. In order to make it possible to enjoy the benefits of having many VCs and keep the clock frequency as high as that of a low-VC router, we propose Parallel Pseudo-Round-Robin (P2R2) arbiter. Our proposal is based on processing multiple groups of requests in parallel. Our... 

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...