Work-in-Progress: A Flexible Router Architecture for 3D NoCs

Abstract

Flexibility either in buffering or routing is a very promising solution for NoC congestion problem. In this paper, a new 3D router with flexible architecture is introduced and validated for 3D NoCs. In fact, the Flexible router architecture introduced in literature would be deadlock prone if it is incorporated in a 3D NoC domain. We successfully design the new buffering constraints and extensively evaluate its performance under various traffic scenarios using real benchmark applications. We show the great enhancement of the new candidate router architecture in comparison to the conventional 3D NoC router architecture. Finally, we show that this enhancement in performance comes at a very low impact in power and area; especially for large NoC sizes.