A scalable NoC topology targeting network performance

Abstract

Scalability, path diversity, and bisection-width are the primary design concerns that significantly affect the NoC performance. The present work proposes an NoC topology taking into account the above design considerations. Rigorous experimentation is done with prevalent counterparts like mesh, torus, flattened-butterfly, butterfly-fat-tree, etc. Low network diameter and sufficient path diversity come up with a minimum of 38% latency improvement among all the cases. A minimum of 5% throughput yield is also found because of relatively high bisection width. Optimized interconnect length makes the design flexible to scale with the increasing network size. Relatively lower router radix brings down the average power consumption of the routers significantly than the existing topologies. A minimum of 27% gain on average router energy is found.