A hybrid NoC combining SDM-based circuit switching with packet switching for real-time applications

In this paper we propose a hybrid network-on-chip which combines Spatial Division Multiplexing “SDM”-based circuit switching and packet switching in order to efficiently and separately handle streaming and best-effort traffics generated by real-time applications. The SDM technique is used in circuit-switched sub-network in order to increase path diversity, thereby improving throughput and mitigating low resource utilization, while packet-switched sub-network is kept as simple as possible. In this way QoS is simply guaranteed without having to share resources, which often leads to a complex design. The proposed hybrid router architecture has been synthesized in FPGA and ASIC, and results show that a practical hybrid network-on-chip can then be built using the proposed approach.