Traffic- and Thermal-aware Adaptive Beltway Routing for three dimensional Network-on-Chip systems

Abstract

The distribution of traffic and temperature in a high-performance three dimensional Network-on-Chip (3D NoC) system become more unbalanced because of chip stacking and applied minimal routing algorithms. To regulate the temperature under a certain thermal limit, the overheated nodes are usually throttled by run-time thermal management (RTM). Therefore, the network topology becomes a Non-Stationary Irregular Mesh (NSI-Mesh) and leads to heavy traffic congestion around the throttled nodes. Because of the traffic imbalance in the network, the system performance degrades sharply as temperature rises. In this paper, a Traffic- and Thermal-aware Adaptive Beltway Routing (TTABR) is proposed to balance both the distribution of the traffic and temperature in the network. The proposed TTABR can be applied to NSI-Mesh and regular mesh. The experimental results show that the proposed TTABR can achieve more balanced both traffic and temperature distribution, and the network throughput is improved by around 3.4~113% with less than 18% area overhead.