Router Design and Implementation for a Polymorphic Multimedia Processor

Abstract

Abstr act. The power and design complexity of parallel processors make the intercore communication mechanism face new requirement and challenges. This paper presents the design of the message passing mechanism and a router for a polymorphic multimedia processor, which employs two mechanisms of data communication, the shared memory among neighbouring processor elements and the remote messaging with routers. Remote messaging includes remote data transmission and remote function call. The router, which is the main remote communication mechanism, has input buffers, and employs a version of the XY routing algorithm. It is able to do efficient multicasting with fault tolerance. It adopts a specialized arbitration scheme to simplify design complexity. This improved architecture reduces the delay of inter-core communication and cuts power consumption. It also improves the performance of the polymorphic multimedia processor.