A 3D bus interconnect for network line cards

In this paper, we propose a 3D bus architecture as a processor-memory interconnection system to increase the throughput of the memory system currently used on line cards. The 3D bus architecture allows multiple processing elements on a line card to access a shared memory. The main advantage of the proposed architecture is to increase the network processor off-chip memory bandwidth while diminishing the latency otherwise caused by the single bus competition.