Title :
A novel shared-buffer router for network-on-chip based on Hierarchical Bit-line Buffer
Author :
Shi, Wei ; Xu, Weixia ; Ren, Hongguang ; Dou, Qiang ; Wang, Zhiying ; Shen, Li ; Liu, Cong
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Comput., Nat. Univ. of Defense Technol., Changsha, China
Abstract :
Buffer resources are key components of the on-chip router, shared-buffer structures are proposed to improve performance and reduce power consumption. This paper presents a novel on-chip network router with a shared-buffer based on Hierarchical Bit-line Buffer (HiBB). HiBB can be configured flexibly according to traffics and its inherent characteristic of low power is also noticeable. Moreover, we propose two schemes to further optimize the router. First, a congestion-aware output-port allocation scheme is used to assign higher priority to packets heading to light-loaded directions, and the congestion situation of the total network will be addressed. Second, an efficient run-time Virtual Channel (VC) regulation scheme is proposed to configure the shared buffer, so that VCs are allocated according to the loads of network. Experimental results show that the proposed HiBB router with about 6.9% area savings outperforms the generic router under different traffic patterns. The power consumption of the HiBB router can also be reduced up to about 70% of the generic router under light traffics, while it may exceed that of the generic one up to about 3.7-5.7% under heavy traffics for the increased flit transmissions.
Keywords :
buffer circuits; low-power electronics; network routing; network-on-chip; HiBB router; congestion-aware output-port allocation scheme; efficient run-time VC regulation scheme; efficient run-time virtual channel regulation scheme; flit transmissions; hierarchical bit-line buffer; low-power characteristic; network-on-chip; on-chip router; power consumption reduction; shared-buffer router; Computer architecture; Registers; Resource management; Switches; System-on-a-chip; Transistors; Congestion Aware; Hierarchical Bit-line Buffer; Network-on-Chip; Output Port Allocation; VC Regulation;
Conference_Titel :
Computer Design (ICCD), 2011 IEEE 29th International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Amherst, MA
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4577-1953-0
DOI :
10.1109/ICCD.2011.6081407