Adaptive inter-layer message routing in 3D networks-on-chip

Existing routing algorithms for 3D deal with regular mesh/torus 3D topologies. Today 3D NoCs are quite irregular, especially those with heterogeneous layers. In this paper, we present a routing algorithm targeting 3D networks-on-chip (NoCs) with incomplete sets of vertical links between adjacent layers. The routing algorithm tolerates multiple link and node failures, in the case of absence of NoC partitioning. In addition, it deals with congestion. The routing algorithm for 3D NoCs preserves the deadlock-free propriety of the chosen 2D routing algorithms. It is also scalable and supports a local reconfiguration that complements the reconfiguration of the 2D routing algorithms in case of failures of nodes or links. The algorithm incurs a small overhead in terms of exchanged messages for reconfiguration and does not introduce significant additional complexity in the routers. Theoretical analysis of the 3D routing algorithm is provided and validated by simulations for different traffic loads and failure rates.     

Online traffic-aware fault detection for networks-on-chip

A key requirement for modern Networks-on-Chip (NoC) is the ability to detect and diagnose faults and failures. This paper addresses the challenge of fault diagnosis using online testing where the interruption of the runtime operation (performance) under diagnosis is minimised. A novel Monitor Module (MM) is proposed to detect NoC interconnect faults which minimise the intrusion of the regular NoC traffic throughput by (1) using a channel tester which only examines NoC channels when they are idle; and (2) using a testing interval parameter based on the Binary Exponential Back off algorithm to dynamically balance the level of testing when recovering from temporary faults. The paper presents results on the minimal impact on NoC throughput for a range of testing conditions and also highlights the minimal area overhead of the MM (11.56%) compared with an adaptive NoC router implemented on FPGA hardware. Simulation results demonstrate non-intrusion of the NoC runtime traffic throughput when channel are fault free, and also how throughput loss is minimised when faults are identified.     

Elastic Flow in an Application Specific Network-on-Chip

A Network-on-Chip (NoC) is increasingly needed to interconnect the large number and variety of Intellectual Property (IP) cells that make up a System-on-Chip (SoC). The network must be able to communicate between cells in di erent clock domains, and do so with minimal space, power, and latency overhead. In this paper, we describe an asynchronous NoC using an elastic-flow protocol, and methods of automatically generating a topology and router placement. We use the communication profile of the SoC design to drive the binary-tree topology creation and the physical placement of routers, and a force-directed approach to determine router locations. The nature of elastic-flow removes the need for large router bu ers, and thus we gain a significant power and space advantage compared to traditional NoCs. Additionally, our network is deadlock-free, and paths have bounded worst-case communication latencies.     

Deadlock-free generic routing algorithms for 3-dimensional Networks-on-Chip with reduced vertical link density topologies

3-Dimensional Networks-on-Chip (3D NoC) have emerged as the promising solution for scalability, power consumption and performance demands of next generation Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) interconnect. Due to the cost in terms of thermal, yield, chip area and design complexity, minimizing the number of Through-Silicon-Via (TSVs) in 3D ICs has become on the most important design issues. In this paper, we will present several stable, simple and deadlock-free generic routing algorithms for 3D NoCs with different reduced vertical link density topologies, which can maintain the 3D NoCs performance and save the system cost (TSV number, chip area, system power, etc.). The experimental results have been extracted from our cycle-accurate GSNOC simulator and have shown that our routing algorithms can maintain the system performance up to reducing 50% of TSVs number in comparison to the 100% TSVs number with ZXY routing algorithm configuration.     

A parametric-based performance evaluation and design trade-offs for interconnect architectures using FPGAs for networks-on-chip

Network-on-Chip (NoC) interconnect fabrics are categorized according to trade-offs among latency, throughput, speed, and silicon area, and the correctness and performance of these fabrics in Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) applications are assessed through experimentation and simulation. In this paper, we propose a consistent parametric method for evaluating the FPGA performance of three common on-chip interconnect architectures namely, the Mesh, Torus and Fat-tree architectures. We also investigate how NoC architectures are affected by interconnect and routing parameters, and demonstrate their flexibility and performance through FPGA synthesis and testing of 392 different NoC configurations. In this process, we found that the Flit Data Width (FDW) and Flit Buffer Depth (FBD) parameters have the heaviest impact on FPGA resources, and that these parameters, along with the number of Virtual Channels (VCs), significantly affect reassembly buffering and routing and logic requirements at NoC endpoints. Applying our evaluation technique to a detailed and flexible cycle accurate simulation, we drive the three NoC architectures using benign (Nearest Neighbor and Uniform) and adversarial (Tornado and Random Permutation) traffic patterns with different numbers of VCs, producing a set of load–delay curves. The results show that by strategically tuning the router and interconnect parameters, the Fat-tree network produces the best utilization of FPGA resources in terms of silicon area, clock frequency, critical path delays, network cost, saturation throughput, and latency, whereas the Mesh and Torus networks showed comparatively high resource costs and poor performance under adversarial traffic patterns. From our findings it is clear that the Fat-tree network proved to be more efficient in terms of FPGA resource utilization and is compliant with the current Xilinx FPGA devices. This approach will assist engineers and architects in establishing an early decision in the choice of right interconnects and router parameters for large and complex NoCs. We demonstrate that our approach substantially improves performance under a large variety of experimentation and simulation which confirm its suitability for real systems.     

片上网络路由器及互连低成本测试方法

三维设计的片上网络(Network-on-chip)是当前的热点研究专题。提出一种有效的片上网络路由器和互连测试方法 显得非常重要。文章通过对路由器分类,提出了一种新的片上网络路由器测试方法。将不同输入、输出端口的路由器分 为不同的类。相同分类的路由器是同构的,它们的测试集也是相同的。针对相同路由器提出了一个基于单播的多播方案 (Unicast-based Multicast),并提出了新的互连测试方法。实验结果表明文章方法是有效的。     

片上互连网络的功耗特征分析与优化

随着处理器核数的增加,片上互连网络NoC结构日趋复杂,导致片上互连网络功耗所占的比重和功耗分析的难度也在增加。片上互连网络的任务映射,既要保证多处理器核心之间通信的高性能,又要保证耗费尽可能少的功耗和面积,即在有限的功耗和面积开销下获得较高的性能。在进行任务映射时,核心之间的通信距离是减少任务通信功耗的关键。连续且近凸的区域有助于缩短任务的通信距离。分析了一种功耗最优的片上互连网络启发式映射算法（INC）,该算法由区域选择算法和节点映射算法组成。对区域选择算法的2个因子进行了改进,使应用总的通信开销最小化且保证后续应用以很小的通信代价进行区域选择。提出了新的基于选择区域的映射算法。它们在动态到达程序映射问题中的实验结果表明,新的区域选择算法和节点映射算法相比于INC,可以减少12.10%的通信功耗,并且带来11.23%的通信延迟优化。     

Characterizing the impact of process variation on 45 nm NoC-based CMPs

Current integration scales make possible to design chip multiprocessors with a large amount of cores interconnected by a NoC. Unfortunately, they also bring process variation, posing a new burden to processor manufacturers.Regarding the NoC, variability causes that the delays of links and routers do not match those initially established at design time. In this paper we analyze how variability affects the NoC by applying a new variability model to 100 instances of an 8 × 8 mesh NoC synthesized using 45 nm technology. We also show that GALS-based NoCs present communication bottlenecks due to the slower components of the network, which cause congestion, thus reducing performance. This performance reduction finally affects the applications being executed in the CMP because they may be mapped to slower areas of the chip. In this paper we show that using a mapping algorithm that considers variability data may improve application execution time up to 50%.     

Multi-hop communications on wireless network-on-chip using optimized phased-array antennas

Network-on-Chip (NoC) as a promising design approach for on-chip interconnect fabrics could overcome the energy as well as synchronization challenges of the conventional interconnects in the gigascale System-on-Chips (SoC). The advantages of communication performance of traditional wired NoC will no longer be continued by the future technology scaling. Packets that travel between distant nodes of a large scale wired on-chip network significantly suffer from energy dissipation and latency due to the routing overhead at each hop. According to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors annual report, the RFCMOS characteristics will be steadily improved by technology scaling. As the operating frequency of RF devices increases, the size of Si integrated antenna will decrease and it is feasible to employ them as a revolutionary interconnect for intra-chip wireless communications. In this paper, we focus on physical requirements and design challenges of wireless NoC. It is demonstrated that employing an optimum-radiation phased array antenna and multihop communications will increase the reliability of on-chip wireless links by several orders of magnitude using a limited power budget less than 0.1 pJ/bit.     

Bringing NoCs to 65 nm

Very deep submicron process technologies are ideal application fields for NoCs, which offer a promising solution to the scalability problem. This article sheds light on the benefits and challenges of NoC-based interconnect design in nanometer CMOS. The experimental results from fully working 65-nm NoC designs and a detailed scalability analysis are presented. The network on chip (NoC) is a promising solution to the scalability problem. NoCs build upon improvements in bus architecture-for example, in terms of topology design.     

A monitoring-aware network-on-chip design flow

Networks-on-chip (NoC) are a scalable interconnect solution for systems on chip and are rapidly becoming reality. Monitoring is a key enabler for debugging or performance analysis and quality-of-service techniques. The NoC design problem and the NoC monitoring problem cannot be treated in isolation. We propose a monitoring-aware NoC design flow able to take into account the monitoring requirements in general. We illustrate our flow with a debug driven monitoring case study of transaction monitoring. By treating the NoC design and monitoring problems in synergy, the area cost of monitoring can be limited to 3–20% in general. We also investigate run-time configuration options for the NoC monitoring system resulting in acceptable configuration times.     

MoNoC: A monitored network on chip with path adaptation mechanism

Complex systems on chip containing dozens of processing resources with critical communication requirements usually rely on the use of networks on chip (NoCs) as communication infrastructure. NoCs provide significant advantages over simpler infrastructures such as shared busses or point to point communication, including higher scalability, more efficient energy management, higher bandwidth and lower average latency. Applications running on NoCs with more than 10% of bandwidth usage attest that the most significant portion of message latencies refers to buffered packets waiting to enter the NoC, whereas the latency portion that depends on the packet traversing the NoC is sometimes negligible. This work presents an adaptive routing architecture, named Monitored NoC (MoNoC), which is based on a traffic monitoring mechanism and the exchange of high priority control packets. This method enables to adapt paths by choosing less congested routes. Practical experiments show that the proposed path adaptation is a fast process, enabling to transmit packets with smaller latencies, up to 9 times smaller, by using non-congested NoC regions.     

Energy-aware routing in hybrid optical network-on-chip for future multi-processor system-on-chip

With the development of Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) in recent years, the intra-chip communication is becoming the bottleneck of the whole system. Current electronic network-on-chip (NoC) designs face serious challenges, such as bandwidth, latency and power consumption. Optical interconnection networks are a promising technology to overcome these problems. In this paper, we study the routing problem in optical NoCs with arbitrary network topologies. Traditionally, a minimum hop count routing policy is employed for electronic NoCs, as it minimizes both power consumption and latency. However, due to the special architecture of current optical NoC routers, such a minimum-hop path may not be energy-wise optimal. Using a detailed model of optical routers we reduce the energy-aware routing problem into a shortest-path problem, which can then be solved using one of the many well known techniques. By applying our approach to different popular topologies, we show that the energy consumed in data communication in an optical NoC can be significantly reduced. We also propose the use of optical burst switching (OBS) in optical NoCs to reduce control overhead, as well as an adaptive routing mechanism to reduce energy consumption without introducing extra latency. Our simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.     

The 2D digraph-based NoCs: attractive alternatives to?the 2D mesh NoCs

This paper proposes two-dimensional directed graphs (or digraphs for short) as a promising alternative to the popular 2D mesh topology for networks-on-chip (NoCs). Mesh is the most popular topology for the NoCs, mainly due to its suitability for on-chip implementation and low cost. However, the fact that a digraph offers a lower diameter than its equivalent linear array of equal cost motivated us to evaluate digraphs as the underlying topology of NoCs. This paper introduces a family of NoC topologies based on three well-known digraphs, namely de Bruijn, shuffle-exchange, and Kautz. We study topological properties of the proposed topologies. We show that the proposed digraph-based topologies have several attractive features including constant node degree, low diameter and cost, and low zero load latency which result in superior performance over the mesh. We introduce a deadlock-free routing algorithm for the proposed NoC topologies and compare NoCs employing the proposed topologies and the mesh topology in terms of power consumption and performance. Simulation results also reveal that the proposed NoC topologies offer higher performance and consume lower power than the mesh NoC.     

ProNoC: A low latency network-on-chip based many-core system-on-chip prototyping platform

Network-on-chip (NoC) is an emerging interconnect infrastructure to address the scalability limitation of conventional shared bus architecture for many-core system-on-chip (MCSoC). Current field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have over million lookup tables, making it possible to prototype a complete NoC-based MCSoC on a single FPGA device. FPGA prototyping allows rapid system verification and optimum design parameters estimation. However, existing NoC-based MCSoC prototypes are usually adopting simple NoC architectural functionality. These NoC prototypes cannot represent a realistic projection of the state-of-the-art application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) NoCs as these prototypes have limited overall system performance. This paper presents ProNoC, an integrated tool for rapid prototyping and validation of NoC-based MCSoC projects targeting FPGA devices. ProNoC adopts most advanced NoC features such as the support of virtual channel (VC), virtual network, low latency routing and different routing algorithms. Results show that NoC interconnect in ProNoC outperforms CONNECT, the most recent VC based prototype NoC with lower logic cell utilization, higher maximum operating frequency, higher average saturation throughput, and lower average communication latency. Moreover, ProNoC is equipped with graphical user interface to facilitate the development of MCSoC prototypes on FPGA platforms.     

基于虫孔交换的NoC映射和通讯参数自动化设计方法研究

NoC映射和通讯参数设计是NoC设计过程中非常重要的部分,其结果直接影响NoC的性能、面积和功耗。本文将NoC映射问题和通讯参数设计问题统一考虑,首先对NoC映射问题进行了形式化定义,然后提出了基于虫孔交换的NoC延迟性能分析方法,根据应用的通讯延迟约束,将应用模型映射到NoC拓扑结构上,并自动设计出NoC通讯参数。实验表明,本文所提出的延迟性能分析方法比以往方法精确7%～13%,映射结果和通讯参数设计更优。     

3D floorplanning of low-power and area-efficient Network-on-Chip architecture

Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures have been adopted by chip multi-processors (CMPs) as a flexible solution to the increasing delay in the deep sub-micron regime. However, the shrinking feature size limits the performance of NoCs due to power and area constraints. In this paper, we propose three 3D floorplanning methods for a Triplet-based Hierarchical Interconnection Network (THIN) which is a new high performance NoC. The proposed floorplanning methods use both Manhattan and Y-architecture routing architectures so as to improve the performance, reduce the power consumption and area requirement of THIN. A cycle accurate simulator was developed based on Noxim NoC simulator and ORION 2.0 energy model. The proposed floorplanning methods show up to 24.69% energy and 8.84% area reduction at best compared with 3D Mesh. Our analysis concludes that THIN is not only a feasible but also a low-power and area-efficient NoC at physical level.     

How to reduce packet dropping in a bufferless NoC

Networks on‐chip (NoCs) interconnect the components located inside a chip. In multicore chips, NoCs have a strong impact on the overall system performance. NoC bandwidth is limited by the critical path delay. Recent works show that the critical path delay is heavily affected by switch port buffer size. Therefore, by removing buffers, switch clock frequency can be increased. Recently, a new switching technique for NoCs called Blind Packet Switching (BPS) has been proposed, which is based on removing the switch port buffers. Since buffers consume a high percentage of switch power and area, BPS not only improves performance but also reduces power and area. In BPS, as there are no buffers at the switch ports, packets cannot be stopped and stored on them. If contention arises packets are dropped and later reinjected, negatively affecting performance. In order to prevent packet dropping, some techniques based on resource replication have been proposed. In this paper, we propose some alternative and complementary techniques that do not rely on resource replication. By using them, packet dropping is highly reduced. In particular, packet dropping is completely removed for a very wide network traffic range. Moreover, network throughput is increased and packet latency is reduced. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Experimental evaluation and comparison of two recent Network-on-Chip routers for FPGAs

Rapid growth in the number of Intellectual Property (IP) cores in System-on-Chip (SoC) resulted in the need for effective and scalable interconnect scheme for system components – Network-on-Chip (NoC). Router is a key component in an NoC design that impacts the overall area utilization. It is crucial to evaluate the area efficiency of NoC routers. In this paper, we evaluate and compare two recent NoC routers for Field Programmable Gated Arrays (FPGAs). The first one is generated using the automated NoC synthesis tool CONfigurable NEtwork Creation Tool (CONNECT). The second one is an NoC router manually designed using VHDL and synthesized Altera Quartus II CAD tool. Three NoC topologies namely ring, mesh and torus are used for evaluating the two routers based on area utilization metric. The routers are evaluated by varying the node sizes from 4 to 16 for each topology. For smaller NoC topologies, CONNECT router uses less area but as the NoC size increases manual router design provides up to 85% reduction in area utilization. The results presented in this paper will be useful to designers interested in NoC implementation on FPGAs.     

Efficient routing techniques in heterogeneous 3D Networks-on-Chip

Three-dimensional Networks-on-Chips (3D NoCs) have recently been proposed to address the on-chip communication demands of future highly dense 3D multi-core systems. Homogeneous 3D NoC topologies have many Through Silicon Vias (TSVs) which have a costly and complex manufacturing process. Also, 3D routers use more memory and are more power hungry than conventional 2D routers. Alternatively, heterogeneous 3D NoCs combine both the area and performance benefits of 2D and 3D static router architectures by using a limited number of TSVs. To improve the performance of heterogeneous 3D NoCs, we propose an adaptive router architecture which balances the traffic in such NoCs. Particularly, experimental results show that our proposed architecture significantly improves the performance up to 75% by replacing 2D static routers with adaptive 2D routers in heterogeneous 3D NoCs, while keeping the maximum clock frequency, power and energy consumption of the adaptive router nearly at the same level as the static router.