Spatial division multiplexing

Abstract

To ensure low power consumption while maintaining flexibility and performance, future Systems-on-Chip (SoC) will combine several types of processor cores and data memory units of widely different sizes. To interconnect the IPs of these heterogeneous platforms, Networks-on-Chip (NoC) have been proposed as an efficient and scalable alternative to shared buses. NoCs can provide throughput and latency guarantees by establishing virtual circuits between source and destination. State-of-the-art NoCs currently exploit Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) to share network resources among virtual circuits, but this typically results in high network area and energy overhead with long circuit set-up time.We propose an alternative solution based on Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM). This paper describes our first design of an SDM-based network, discusses design alternatives for network implementation and shows why SDM should be better adapted to NoCs than TDM for a limited number of circuits.Our case study clearly illustrates the advantages of our technique over TDM in terms of energy consumption, area overhead, and flexibility. SDM thus deserves to be explored in more depth, and in particular in combination with TDM in a hybrid scheme.