An Efficient Hybridization Scheme for Stacked Mesh 3D NoC Architecture

Three-dimensional (3D) integration is a viable design paradigm to overcome the existing interconnect bottleneck in integrated systems and enhance system power/performance characteristics. In order to exploit the intrinsic capability of reducing the wire length in 3D ICs, stacked mesh 3D NoC architecture was proposed. However, this architecture suffers from naive and straightforward hybridization between NoC and bus media. In this paper, an efficient hybridization scheme is presented to enhance system performance, power consumption, and area of stacked mesh 3D NoC architectures. By utilizing a routing rule called LastZ the proposed hybridization scheme offers many advantages investigated in detail to emphasize the significant achievements. Our extensive simulations with synthetic and real benchmarks, including an integrated videoconference application show that compared to a typical 3D NoC-Bus Hybrid Mesh architecture, our hybridization scheme achieves significant power, performance, and area improvements.