Deadlock Free Routing Algorithms for Mesh Topology NoC Systems with Regions

Region concept helps to accommodate cores larger than the tile size in mesh topology NoC architectures. In addition, it offers many new opportunities for NoC design, as well as provides new design issues and challenges. The most important among these is the design of a deadlock free routing algorithm. In this paper, we present and compare two routing algorithms for mesh topology NoC with regions. The first algorithm is borrowed from the area of fault tolerant networks and is adapted for the NoC context. We compare this with an algorithm designed using a methodology for design of application specific routing algorithms for communication networks. Our study shows that the application specific routing algorithm not only provides much higher adaptivity, but also superior performance as compared to the other algorithm in all traffic cases