Latency Reduction of Global Traffic in Wormhole-Routed Meshes Using Hierarchical Rings for Global Routing

The mesh network-on-chip (NoC) topology has its drawbacks in the communication latency scalability, and the concentration of the traffic in the center of the mesh. We propose a topology where a traditional wormhole-routed mesh network is augmented by a hierarchical ring interconnect for routing global traffic. In addition to the topology, the routing strategies have a large impact on system performance. We compare the performance of a deterministic and adaptive routing strategy when applied to our augmented topology. A SystemC modeling platform was used to compare the traditional wormhole-routed mesh with the augmented architecture. The proposed architecture reduces the average latencies incurred by global traffic, while the application of a adaptive routing strategy can further increase performance.