Multicast Routing With Dynamic Packet Fragmentation

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) become a critical design factor as Chip MultiProcessors (CMPs) and Systems on a Chip (SoCs) scale up with technology. With fundamental benefits of high bandwidth and scalability in on-chip networks, a newly added multicast capability can further enhance the performance by reducing the network load and facilitate coherence protocols of many-core CMPs. This paper proposes a novel multicast router with dynamic packet fragmentation in on-chip networks. Packet fragmentation is performed to avoid deadlock in blocking situations, releasing the hold of an output Virtual Channel (VC) and allowing another packet to use the freed VC.