An SDRAM-Aware Router for Networks-on-Chip

This paper presents a NoC (Networks-on-Chip) router with an SDRAM-aware flow control. Based on a priority-based arbitration, it schedules packets to improve memory utilization and reduce memory latency. Moreover, the multi-scheduling scheme performed by the multiple SDRAM-aware routers helps to achieve better SDRAM performance and save the hardware cost of NoC platform. Experimental results show that the SDRAM-aware router improves memory latency by 18% and memory utilization by 4.9% on average with over 42% saving of gate count of the NoC platform with dual memory subsystem.