Delay Optimized Architecture for On-Chip Communication

Networks-on-chip (NoC), a new system on chip (SoC) paradigm, has become a great focus of research by many groups during the last few years. Among all the NoC architectures that have been proposed until now, 2D-Mesh has proved to be the best architecture for implementation due to its regular and simple intercon- nection structure. In this paper, we propose a new interconnect architecture called 2D-diagonal mesh (2DDgl-Mesh) for on-chip communication. The 2DDgl- Mesh is almost similar to traditional 2D-Mesh in aspects of cost, area, and implementation, but it can outperform the later in delay. The both architectures are compared by using NS-2 (a network simulator) and CINSIM (a component based interconnection simulator) under the same traffic models and parametric conditions. The results of comparison show that under the proposed architecture, the packets can almost always be routed to their destinations in less time. In addition, our archi- tecture can sometimes perform better than 2D-Mesh in drop ratio for special fixed traffic models.