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

This paper proposes a hybrid Network-on-Chip “NoC” which takes advantage of the best of packet switching and circuit-switching in order to handle efficiently both best-effort and streaming traffics generated by real-time applications. The proposed hybrid NoC consists of two sub-networks: a circuit-switched sub-network and a packet-switched sub-network. The circuit-switched sub-network combines Spatial Division Multiplexing “SDM” and Time Division Multiplexing “TDM” in order to increase path diversity in the NoC and to improve resources usage, in this way, quality of service is easily provided for streaming traffic while the packet-switched sub-network handles the best-effort traffic. A 7*7 2D mesh NoC is built and simulated. Simulation results show that this approach allows an increase of the probability of establishing paths through the NoC, reducing thereby contention in the NoC with a reasonable hardware cost as shown in synthesis results.