A NoC Router with Dynamically Allocated Virtual-Output-Queueing

The traditional router with virtual channel flow control alleviates the loss of link throughput and networks congestion by increasing virtual channels. However, it results in low utilization of buffers and excessive area cost of arbitration logic. And the router with dynamically allocated virtual channels can improve the buffer utilization and link throughput by organizing the buffers dynamically, but it can not avoid the rapid increase of the logic for flow control and arbitration. To improve the link throughput and buffer utilization, we propose a NoC router with dynamically allocated virtual-output-queues (DAVOQ) in order to obtain a good tradeoff between performance and overhead. In the router DAVOQ, the buffers are organized by rapid-linked lists and the logic area of arbitration, and pipeline is reduced and optimized based on lookahead routing. The simulation and synthesis results show that the router DAVOQ can reduce latency and improve throughput, yielding saving of standard cells area by 15.1% and saving of leakage power by 12.9% under 0.13 μm CMOS process in comparison with traditional router with virtual channels. And it can obtain considerable latency reduction with losing a little network throughput, and yield saving of standard cells area by 15.6% and saving of leakage power by 20.5% when compared with the router with dynamically allocated virtual channels.