Power and performance analysis of 3D network-on-chip architectures

Abstract

Emerging 3D integrated circuits(ICs) employ 3D network-on-chip(NoC) to improve power, performance, and scalability. The NoC Simulator uses the microarchitecture parameters to estimate the power and performance of the NoC. We explore the design space for 3D Mesh and Butterfly Fat Tree(BFT) NoC architecture using floorplan drive wire length and link delay estimation. The delay and power models are extended using Through Silicon Via (TSV) power and delay models. Serialization is employed to reduce the TSV area cost. Buffer space is equalised for a fair comparison between topologies. The Performance, Flits per Joules(FpJ) and Energy Delay Product(EDP) of six 2D and 3D variants of Mesh and BFT topologies (two and four layers) are analyzed by injecting synthetic traffic patterns. The 3D-4L Mesh exhibit better performance, energy efficiency (up to 4.5 × ), and EDP (up to 98 %) compared to other variants. This is because the overall length of the horizontal link is short and the number of TSVs is large (3 × ).