Formula omitted]-WiNoC: Exploring scalable wireless on-chip micronetworks for heterogeneous embedded many-core SoCs

Abstract

Modern embedded SoC design uses a rapidly increasing number of processing units for ubiquitous computing, forming the so-called embedded many-core SoCs (McSoC). Such McSoC devices allow superior performance gains while side-stepping the power and heat dissipation limitations of clock frequency scaling. The main advantage lies in the exploitation of parallelism, distributively and massively. Consequently, the on-chip communication fabric becomes the performance determinant. To bridge the widening gap between computation requirements and communication efficiency faced by gigascale McSoCs in the upcoming billion-transistor era, a new on-chip communication system, dubbed Wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC), has been proposed by using the recently developed RF interconnect technology. With the high data-rate, low power and ultra-short range interconnection provided by UWB technology, the WiNoC design paradigm calls for effective solutions to overhaul the on-chip communication infrastructure of gigascale McSoCs.In this work, an irregular and reconfigurable WiNoC platform is proposed to tackle ever increasing complexity, density and heterogeneity challenges. A flexible RF infrastructure is established where RF nodes are properly distributed and IP cores are clustered. Consequently, a performance-cost effective topology is formed. A region-aided routing scheme is further deigned and implemented to realize loop-free, minimum path cost and high scalability for irregular WiNoC infrastructure. To implement the data transmission protocol, the RF microarchitecture of WiNoC is developed where the RF nodes are designed to fulfill the functions of distributed table routing, multi-channel arbitration, virtual output queuing, and distributed flow control. Our simulation studies based on synthetic traffics demonstrate the network efficiency and scalability of WiNoC.