Architectural simulations of a fast, source-synchronous ring-based Network-on-Chip design

Abstract

Recently, a new source-synchronous ring-based NoC architecture has been proposed, which runs significantly faster than the PEs and offers a high bandwidth and low contention free latency. Architectural simulations show that the original ring-based NoC design suffers from deadlock. In this paper, we explore the architectural aspects of the fast ring-based NoC after redesigning the routers used in the previous authors' work to avoid deadlock. Architectural results obtained on synthetic traffic demonstrate that the modified ring-based NoC has up to 3.5× lower latency and up to 2.9× higher maximum sustained injection rate compared with a state of the art mesh-based NoC.