Design and implementation of a NoC router supporting multicast

Multicast communication has increasingly become common and indispensable for Network-on-Chip (NoC). Router is the key unit of NoC, but few of its implementations provide multicast communication directly. In this letter, we design a tree-based multicast router using differentiated subnetwork. Also, we propose a new deadlockfree routing algorithm to overcome the complex deadlock problem on NoC when it involves multicast communication. In addition, a verification platform on RTL-level is established and synthesized for a Xilinx XC5VLX110T chip. The synthesis reports show that, the multicast router consumes 21.45% less of the chip’s storage resources and 3.82% less of the logic resources when in comparison to the result of unicast router that has the same configuration parameters. The maximum operating frequency is up to 158.203 MHz.