FeRoNoC: Flexible and extensible Router implementation for diagonal mesh topology

Networks on Chip (NoCs) can improve a set of performances criteria, in complex SoCs, such as scalability, flexibility and adaptability. However, performances of a NoC are closely related to its topology. The diameter and average distance represent an important factor in term of performances and implementation. The proposed diagonal mesh topology is designed to offer a good tradeoff between hardware cost and theoretical quality of service (QoS). It can contain a large number of nodes without changing the maximum diameter which is equal to 2. In this paper, we present a new router architecture called FeRoNoC (Flexible, extensible Router NoC) and its Register Transfer Level (RTL) hardware implementation for the diagonal mesh topology. The architecture of our NoC is based on a flexible and extensible router which consists of a packet switching technique and deterministic routing algorithm. Effectiveness and performances of the proposed topology have been shown using a virtex5 FPGA implementation. A comparative performances study of the proposed NoC architecture with others topology is performed.