A 15 mW 1.6 Gb/s wormhole data router for 2-D meshes

We designed and implemented a wormhole data router chip for 2-D meshes with bi-directional channels and token-exchange arbitration. In our design, the token-exchange delay is fully hidden and no latency penalty occurs when there is no traffic contention. We have distributed decoders and arbiters for each IO port, and a fully-connected crossbar switch to increase parallelism of data routing. The router also has hardware support for path-based multicasting. From measured results, we showed that multicasting communication is much more energy efficient than unicasting. The wormhole router was fabricated using MOSIS/HP 0.6 /spl mu/m technology. It can deliver 1.6 Gb/s (50 MHz)@Vdd=2.1 V and consumes an average power of 15 mW.