Design Space Exploration for Wireless NoCs Incorporating Irregular Network Routing

Abstract

The millimeter-wave small-world wireless network-on-chip (mSWNoC) is an enabling interconnect architecture to design high-performance and low-power multicore chips. As the mSWNoC has an overall irregular topology, it is essential to design and optimize suitable deadlock-free routing mechanisms for it. In this paper, we quantify the latency, energy dissipation, and thermal profiles of mSWNoC architectures by incorporating irregular network routing strategies. We demonstrate that the latency, energy dissipation, and thermal profile are affected by the adopted routing methodologies. The overall system performance and thermal profile are governed by the traffic-dependent optimization of the routing methods. Our aim is to establish the energy-thermal-performance trade-offs for the mSWNoC depending on the exact routing strategy and the characteristics of the benchmarks considered.