关键词: 片上网络, 路由, 映射, 虚信道, 流量特征

Abstract: The Networks-on-Chip (NoC) approach was proposed as a promising solution to on-chip communication problems, but it is by far more resource limited. The standard topology structure cannot satisfy the application traffic demand and leads to overconsumption of the power and area. These designs that are adequate for general-purpose systems cannot satisfy quality-of-service oriented, predictable interconnects. This paper proposed a new Bandwidth-Aware Routing Technique (BART) that optimized the network performance for application-specific NoCs. More precisely, the specific application and traffic characteristics were given. The proposed routing technique has two phases. In the first phase, a communication-aware mapping technique was used to obtain a near-optimal assignment of IPs to network nodes. In the second phase, a bandwidth-aware routing algorithm was used to find the minimal route for each flow in the network. It was ensured that the routes were deadlock-free through static virtual channel assignment. Besides, BART combined a method for router table compression to reduce the hardware overhead. The evaluation results show that BART has better performance than the existing routing algorithms.

Key words: Network-on-Chip (NoC), routing, mapping, virtual channel, traffic characteristic