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A Fully-pipelined Reconfigurable Microarchitecture for On-chip Routers

Bashizade, Ramin | 2013

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 44877 (19)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Computer Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Sarbazi-Azad, Hamid
  7. Abstract:
  8. The shrinkage of feature sizes has resulted in global wiring delays being the bottleneck in on-chip interconnects. As a consequence, Network-on-Chip (NoC) emerged as a desirable interconnect structure between Processing Elements (PEs) on a chip. On the other hand, due to the non-uniform communication patterns among PEs, it is beneficial for the routers input ports to have a reconfigurable buffer structure. Having this in mind, we proposed a reconfigurable microarchitecture for on-chip routers which is able to reconfigure the Virtual Channels (VCs) in input ports, without lowering the clock frequency of the router. For this purpose, we presented a simple and efficient mechanism for monitoring the traffic flow in routers input ports, and designed a structure which provides reconfigurability with a reasonable overhead. We also proposed a new structure for Round-Robin (RR) Arbiters, which is called Multi-Priority RR Arbiter, in order to shorten the critical path of the Switch Allocation (SA) stage in the router pipeline, and hence improve the clock frequency of the router. The clock frequency ratio of our proposed router to a baseline router is 2.4, despite having a higher number of possible VCs per input port. It also delays network saturation point up to 16.9% under synthetic traffic patterns. These modifications incur 6.2% and 10.8% power and area overheads, respectively
  9. Keywords:
  10. Network-on-Chip (NOC) ; Router ; Reconfiguration ; Traffic Flow Monitoring ; Multi Priority Arbiter

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