Savva Savvas, Tatas Konstantinos, Kyriacou Costas
Department of Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Informatics, Frederick University, 1036 Nicosia, Cyprus.
Frederick Research Center and Department of Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Informatics, Frederick University, 1036 Nicosia, Cyprus.
Micromachines (Basel). 2023 Jan 28;14(2):335. doi: 10.3390/mi14020335.
This paper introduces a novel 3D NoC router that combines buffered and bufferless routing with approximate priority comparison when deflecting flits. Our proposal is a modification of an asymmetrical router that is buffered in the z dimension ports and bufferless in the x and y dimension ports. Flits that request output ports in the x and y dimensions are granted or deflected based on approximate, instead of accurate, priority comparison. Experimental results show that the proposed router, in addition to effectively combining the advantages of both buffered and bufferless routers, achieves additional performance and area gains due to the reduced logic required for approximate priority comparison in flit deflections. Experimental results using synthetic and realistic traffic show that the proposed router begins to saturate at a significantly higher injection rate than a bufferless router, but at a slightly lower injection rate than when using accurate priority comparison. Furthermore, the proposed router achieves higher clock frequencies and a reduced area compared to bufferles routers due to the simpler permutation network. The increased routing efficiency is shown to also translate to energy gains.
本文介绍了一种新型的3D片上网络（NoC）路由器，该路由器在偏转微片时将缓冲路由和无缓冲路由与近似优先级比较相结合。我们的方案是对一种非对称路由器的改进，该非对称路由器在z维度端口进行缓冲，而在x和y维度端口无缓冲。请求x和y维度输出端口的微片基于近似而非精确的优先级比较被准许或偏转。实验结果表明，所提出的路由器除了有效地结合了缓冲路由器和无缓冲路由器的优点外，由于在微片偏转时近似优先级比较所需的逻辑减少，还实现了额外的性能和面积增益。使用合成流量和实际流量的实验结果表明，所提出的路由器在比无缓冲路由器显著更高的注入率下开始饱和，但比使用精确优先级比较时的注入率略低。此外，由于置换网络更简单，与无缓冲路由器相比，所提出的路由器实现了更高的时钟频率和更小的面积。路由效率的提高也转化为了能量增益。
