1-4244-1027-4/07/$25.00 ©2007 IEEE Latency Reduction of Global Traffic in Wormhole-Routed Meshes Using Hierarchical Rings for Global Routing

The mesh Network-on-Chip (NoC) topology has its drawbacks in the communication latency scalability, and the concentration of the traffic in the center of the mesh. We propose a topology where a traditional wormhole-routed mesh network is augmented by a hierarchical ring intercon-nect for routing global traffic. In addition to the topology, the routing strategies have a large impact on system perfor-mance. We compare the performance of a deterministic and adaptive routing strategy when applied to our augmented topology. A SystemC modeling platform was used to com-pare the traditional wormhole–routed mesh with the aug-mented architecture. The proposed architecture reduces the average latencies incurred by global traffic, while the ap-plication of a adaptive routing strategy can further increase performance. 1