Implementation of Dynamic and Efficient Virtual Channel Router for Network on Chip with Virtual Channel Arbitration Reduction and Parallel Switch Allocation Unit

Abstract

— Network on chip (NoC) is a new method of interconnecting modules in system on chip (SoC). Now a day, it is believed that this new communication subsystem will replace the bus-based architecture and will become dominant in SoC design technology. The performance of NoC mainly depends on the router so it is considered as the crucial part in the NoC design. This paper describes the different factors which affect the NoC performance and provides solution to solve these problems. The proposed router has three architectural modifications which makes it dynamic and efficient as compare to generic virtual channel router. This paper introduced the dynamic buffer allocation scheme in which virtual channels and buffer slots are selected and allocated dynamically depending on the network traffic conditions in real time which in turn increases the throughput. In this paper, we have focused on optimizing the virtual channel arbitration (VA) unit design and switch allocation (SA) unit design as well as focusing the maximum utilization of buffer so that it will result in minimizing the latency, area and power. The source code of the router is written in VHDL hardware description language and the simulation and synthesizing the router is done in Xilinx ISE Design Suite 13.1. The parameters like area, frequency, delay, power, latency and throughput are calculated. The results of this modified virtual channel router are compared with the generic virtual channel router. Keywords—Intellectual Property (IP), Network on Chip (NoC), Network Interface (NI), Switch allocation (SA), System-on-Chip (SoC), Virtual channel (VC), Virtual channel arbitration (VA)