A New CDMA Encoding/Decoding Method for on-Chip Communication Network

Abstract

As a high performance on-chip communication method, the code division multiple access (CDMA) technique has recently been applied to networks on chip (NoCs). We propose a new standard-basis-based encoding/decoding method to leverage the performance and cost of CDMA NoCs in area, power assumption, and network throughput. In the transmitter module, source data from different senders are separately encoded with an orthogonal code of a standard basis and these coded data are mixed together by an XOR operation. Then, the sums of data can be transmitted to their destinations through the on-chip communication infrastructure. In the receiver module, a sequence of chips is retrieved by taking an AND operation between the sums of data and the corresponding orthogonal code. After a simple accumulation of these chips, original data can be reconstructed. We implement our encoding/decoding method and apply it to a CDMA NoC with a star topology. Compared with the state-of-the-art Walsh-code-based (WB) encoding/decoding technique, our method achieves up to 67.46% power saving and 81.24% area saving together with decrease of 30%–50% encoding/decoding latency. Moreover, the CDMA NoC with different sizes applying our encoding/decoding method gains power saving, area saving, and maximal throughput improvement up to 20.25%, 22.91%, and 103.26%, respectively, than the WB CDMA NoC.