A Flexible Hybrid Interconnection Design for High-Performance and Energy-Efficient Chiplet-Based Systems

Chiplet-based multi-die integration has prevailed in modern computing system designs as it provides an agile solution for improving processing power with reduced manufacturing costs. In chiplet-based implementations, complete electronic systems are created by integrating individual hardware components through interconnection networks that consist of intra-chiplet network-on-chips (NoCs) and an inter-chiplet silicon interposer. Unfortunately, current interconnection designs have become the limiting factor in further scaling performance and energy efficiency. Specifically, inter-chiplet communication through silicon interposers is expensive due to the limited throughput. The existing wired Network-on-Chip (NoC) design is not good for multicast and broadcast communication because of limited bandwidth, high hop count and limited hardware resources leading to high overhead, latency and power consumption. On the other hand, wireless components might be helpful for multicast/broadcast communications, but they require high setup latency which cannot be used for one-to-one communication. In this paper, we propose a hybrid interconnection design for high-performance and low-power communications in chiplet-based systems. The proposed design consists of both wired and wireless interconnects that can adapt to diverse communication patterns and requirements. A dynamic control policy is proposed to maximize the performance and minimize power consumption by allocating all traffic to wireless or wired hardware components based on the communication patterns. Evaluation results show that the proposed hybrid design achieves 8% to 46% lower average end-to-end delay and 0.93 to 2.7× energy saving over the existing designs with minimized overhead.