Pipelined Control-Path Effects on Area and Performance of a Wormhole-Switched Network-on-Chip

This paper presents design trade-off and performance impacts of the amount of pipeline phase of control path signals in a wormhole-switched Network-on-Chip (NoC). The numbers of the pipeline phase of the control path vary between two- and one-cycle pipeline phase. The control paths consist of the routing request paths for output selection and the arbitration paths to input selection. Data communications between on-chip routers are implemented synchronously and for quality of service, the inter-router data transport are controlled by using a link-level congestion control to avoid lose of data because of an overflow. The trade-off between the area (logic cell area) and the performance (bandwidth gain) of two proposed NoC router microarchitectures are presented in this paper.