Mesh Connected Crossbars: A Novel NoC Topology with Scalable Communication Bandwidth

Recent studies have revealed that on-chip interconnects neither is wire plentiful nor is bandwidth cheap. Based on the results of these studies, in physical design of multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoCs), both the wiring density constraint and routing of wires are controversial issues, and there is a trade-off between the network bandwidth and wiring limitations. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a new topology, named mesh connected crossbars (MCC), to enhance the communication bandwidth between processing elements; the proposed topology, also, has significant topological advantages over traditional torus- and mesh-based NoCs. Furthermore, we study the topological properties of MCCs and propose deterministic and fully adaptive deadlock-free routing algorithms in an attempt to evaluate the performance of MCC in different working conditions. The simulation results show that under constant wiring conditions, MCC exhibits higher performance and consumes lower energy in comparison with equivalent torus or mesh networks.