Area and power-efficient innovative congestion-aware Network-on-Chip architecture

A case of area- and energy-efficient heterogeneous mesh network-on-chip

“…Figure 2 (b) shows the view of heterogeneous mesh with diagonal links. This design, taking full advantage of abundant wiring tracks, is widely adopted in literatures, such as work [4,5,6]. In case of fig 2 (b), we can observe that there is higher bandwidth and buffer density in the center of heterogeneous mesh network than the peripheral area of network, which can better map the aggregated traffic of mesh network and shorten the network diameter.…”

“…In these topologies, the mesh network is the most widely studied in research and employed in prototype systems due to its better scalability, regularity and ease of implementation in silicon. Recently, many variants of mesh had been proposed [5,6]. In these mesh variant, scarce resources like buffers and bandwidth are uniformly distributed in all nodes.…”

“…Some previous work explored different designs of mesh network by redistributing buffers and links or reconfiguring different number ports or bandwidth of links [5,6,7,8]. In addition, diagonal link design in chip manufacturing for the 2D mesh network has been proposed [15].…”

“…Mesh network topology in all network topologies draws special attention and is adopted in research and practical systems because of the scalability, regularity and ease of implementation. In recent years, researchers have also proposed many modified mesh topologies [5,6]. In the work [5], the X-network is employed to implement area-efficient router blocks, and one processing element (PE) is connected to four routers, and then one router also is connected to four PEs.…”

“…In the work [5], the X-network is employed to implement area-efficient router blocks, and one processing element (PE) is connected to four routers, and then one router also is connected to four PEs. In the work [6], diagonal links are added between switches. However, these mesh networks are homogeneous and non-edge symmetrical mesh networks, thus them are inherited shortcomings of mesh network.…”