Design of an Area-Efficient and Low-Power Hierarchical NoC Architecture Based on Circuit Switching

Woo Joo KIM, Sung Hee LEE, Sun Young HWANG

Summary :

This paper presents a hierarchical NoC architecture to support GT (Guaranteed Throughput) signals to process multimedia data in embedded systems. The architecture provides a communication environment that meets the diverse conditions of communication constraints among IPs in power and area. With a system based on packet switching, which requires storage/control circuits to support GT signals, it is hard to satisfy design constraints in area, scalability and power consumption. This paper proposes a hierarchical 444 mesh-type NoC architecture based on circuit switching, which is capable of processing GT signals requiring high throughput. The proposed NoC architecture shows reduction in area by 50.2% and in power consumption by 57.4% compared with the conventional NoC architecture based on circuit switching. These figures amount to by 72.4% and by 86.1%, when compared with an NoC architecture based on packet switching. The proposed NoC architecture operates in the maximum throughput of 19.2 Gb/s.

• Publication: IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals Vol.E92-A No.3 pp.890-899
• Publication Date: 2009/03/01
• Online ISSN: 1745-1337
• DOI: 10.1587/transfun.E92.A.890
• Type of Manuscript: PAPER
• Category: VLSI Design Technology and CAD

Authors

Woo Joo KIM
Sung Hee LEE
Sun Young HWANG

Keyword

Network on Chip,  central routing,  circuit switching,  low-power switch,  hierarchical topology