Performance Enhancement of Bidirectional NOC Router With and Without Contention for Reconfigurable Coarse Grained Architecture

Abstract

Network on Chip (NoC) router plays a vital role in System on Chip (SoC) applications. Routing operation is difficult to perform inside the SoC chip. Because it contains millions of chips in one single Integrated Circuit (IC), in which every chip consists of millions of transistors. Hence NoC router is designed to enable efficient routing operation in the SoC board.  NoC router consists of Network Interconnects (NI), Crossbar Switches, arbiters, a routing logic and buffers. Conventional unidirectional router is designed by priority based Round Robin Arbiter (RRA). It produces more delay to find the priority, which comes from various input channels and more area is consumed in unidirectional router. Also if any path failure occurs, it cannot route the data through other output channel. To overcome this problem, a novel bidirectional NoC router with and without contention is proposed, which offers less area and high speed than the existing unidirectional router. A novel bidirectional NoC router consists of round robin arbiter, Static RAM, switch allocator, virtual channel allocator and crossbar switch. The proposed bidirectional router can route the data from any input channel to each and every output channel. So it avoids conflict situation and path failure problems. If any path fails, immediately it will take the alternative path through the switch allocator. The proposed routing scheme is applied into the coarse grained architecture for improving the speed of the interconnection link between two processing elements. Simulation is performed by ModelSim6.3c and synthesis is carried out by Xilinx10.1.