A SDM-TDM-Based Circuit-Switched Router for On-Chip Networks

Abstract

This article proposes a circuit-switched router that combines Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM) and Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) in order to increase path diversity in the router while sharing channels among multiple connections. In this way, the probability of establishing paths through the network is increased, thereby significantly reducing contention in the network. Furthermore, Quality of Service (QoS) is easily guaranteed. The proposed router was synthesized on an Stratix III 3SL340F FPGA device. A 4 × 4 2D Mesh SDM-TDM Network-on-Chip (NoC) was built with the proposed router and synthesized on the 3SL340F FPGA device. The 4 × 4 2D Mesh SDM-TDM NoC was used to build on an FPGA device, a Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) platform consisted of 16 Nios II/f processors, 16 20-KB On-chip Memories, and 16 Network Interfaces. Synthesis results of the MPSoC platform show that the proposed router architecture can be used to built large practicable MPSoC platforms with the proposed NoC architecture with a reasonable hardware overhead and appreciable clock frequency. Simulation results show that combining SDM and TDM techniques in a router allows the highest probability of establishing paths through the network.