A low-power crossroad switch architecture and its core placement for network-on-chip

As the number of cores on a chip increases, power consumed by the communication structures takes significant portion of the overall power-budget. The individual components of the SoCs will be heterogeneous in nature with widely varying functionality and communication requirements. The communication topology should possibly match communication workflows among these components. In this paper, the authors first proposed an interconnection architecture for SoC, which uses crossroad switches to construct a dedicated communication path dynamically between any two cores. Then a design methodology for constructing network on chip (NoC) was presented for application-specific computer systems with profiled communication characteristics. A core placement tool, which automatically maps cores to a communication topology such that the total communication energy can be minimized, was proposed. Experimental results show that the design methodology can generate optimized on-chip networks with fewer resources than meshes and tori, and the power saving approximates to 40%.