An interconnection architecture for network-on-chip systems

Abstract

Network on Chip (NoC) is a discipline research path that primarily addresses the global communication in System on Chip (SoC). It is inspired and uses the same routing and switching techniques needed in multi-computer networks. Current shared-bus based on-chip communication architectures generally have limited scalability due to the nature of the buses especially when complex on-chip communication SoC is needed. The main goal is to have a dedicated communication infrastructure in the system that can scale up while minimizing the area and power. The selected topology of the components interconnects plays prime rule in the performance of NoC architecture as well as routing and switching techniques that can be used. In this paper, we introduce a new NoC architecture by adapting a recursive topology structure. An experimental study is performed to compare this structure with basic NoC topologies represented by 2D mesh and Spidergon. The analysis illustrates the main features of this topology and its unique benefits. The simulation results show that recursive network outperforms 2D mesh and Spidergon in main performance metrics.