Routerless networks-on-chip

Abstract

Traditional bus-based interconnects are simple and easy to implement, but the scalability is greatly limited. While router-based networks-on-chip (NoCs) offer superior scalability, they also incur significant power and area overhead due to complex router structures. In this work, we explore a new class of on-chip networks, referred to as Routerless NoCs , where routers are completely eliminated. We propose a novel design that utilizes on-chip wiring resources smartly to achieve comparable hop count and scalability as router-based NoCs. Several effective techniques are also proposed that significantly reduce the resource requirement to avoid new network abnormalities in routerless NoC designs. Evaluation results show that, compared with a conventional mesh, the proposed routerless NoC achieves 9.5× reduction in power, 7.2× reduction in area, 2.5× reduction in zero-load packet latency, and 1.7× increase in throughput. Compared with a state-of-the-art low-cost NoC design, the proposed approach achieves 7.7× reduction in power, 3.3× reduction in area, 1.3× reduction in zero-load packet latency, and 1.6× increase in throughput.