PVS-NoC: Partial Virtual Channel Sharing NoC Architecture

A novel architecture aiming for ideal performance and overhead tradeoff, PVS-NoC (Partial VC Sharing NoC), is presented. Virtual channel (VC) is an efficient technique to improve network performance, while suffering from large silicon and power overhead. We propose sharing the VC buffers among dual inputs, which provides the performance advantage as conventional VC-based router with minimized overhead. We reason theoretically and demonstrate quantitatively the benefits of proposed architecture by comparing to state-of-the-art NoC routers, with various traffic patterns. Extensive experiments with synthetic and real benchmarks show significant area and power saving with similar performance compared to latest VC based NoC architectures.