A cost and performance comparison for wormhole routers based on HDL designs

Abstract

Our research investigates cost and performance characteristics for wormhole routers based on HDL designs. Comparison for dimension order routers and turn model based adaptive routers leads to the following conclusions: (1) static and additional routing information which we propose, such as prior dimension specification and in-order delivery, improves the communication performance; (2) an adaptive routing algorithm must be implemented to satisfy the objective speed of the design (the operation speed of the routers significantly affects the network performance); (3) the virtual channels cancel the improvement not only for the dimension order router but also for the naive implementation of the adaptive routers when they degrade the operation speed.