Performance and power efficient on-chip communication using adaptive virtual point-to-point connections

In this paper, we propose a packet-switched network-on-chip (NoC) architecture which can provide a number of low-power, low-latency virtual point-to-point connections for communication flows. The work aims to improve the power and performance metrics of packet-switched NoC architectures and benefits from the power and resource utilization advantages of NoCs and superior communication performance of point-to-point dedicated links. The virtual point-to-point connections are set up by bypassing the entire router pipeline stages of the intermediate nodes. This work addresses constructing the virtual point-to-point connections at run-time using a light-weight setup network. It involves monitoring the NoC traffic in order to detect heavy communication flows and setting up a virtual point-to-point connection for them using a run-time circuit construction mechanism. The evaluation results show a significant reduction in power and latency over a traditional packet-switched NoC.