Performance comparison of selected wired and wireless networks on chip architectures

Abstract

In this paper we compare performance intra-core communications in network on chips. We consider two alternative architectures, wired and wireless. The wired on is based on a common bus (ring) with all the cores attached to it. We compare it to the mesh (point-to-point) architecture based on THz wireless links operating in 0.1 − 0.54 frequency band. Using reference latencies of inter-core communications in modern CPUs we perform an applicability assessment of considered schemes. As performance metrics of interest we consider both delay and capacity. Our results indicate that the latter architecture outperforms the former by a singificant margin. The proposed system can be realized implementing directional antennas at all cores and ensuring that cores are placed on a chip such that there is no interference between them.