An analytical model for worst-case reorder buffer size of multi-path minimal routing NoCs

Reorder buffers are often needed in multi-path routing networks-on-chips (NoCs) to guarantee in-order packet delivery. However, the buffer sizes are usually over-dimensioned, due to lack of worst-case analysis, leading to unnecessary larger area overhead. Based on network calculus, we propose an analysis framework for the worst-case reorder buffer size in multi-path minimal routing NoCs. Experiments with synthetic traffic and an industry case show that our method can effectively explore the traffic splitting space, as well as the mapping effects in terms of reorder buffer size with a maximum improvement of 36.50%.