Design of a High-Performance Buffered Crossbar Switch Fabric Using Network on Chip

High-performance routers constitute the basic building blocks of the Internet. The wide majority of today’s high-performance routers are designed using a crossbar fabric switch as interconnect topology. The buffered crossbar (CICQ) switching architecture is known to be the best crossbar-based architecture for routers design. However, CICQs require expensive on-chip buffers whose cost grows quadratically with the router port count. Additionally, they use long wires to connect router inputs to outputs, resulting in non-negligible delays. In this thesis, we propose a novel design for the CICQ switch architecture. We design the whole buffered crossbar fabric as a Network on Chip (NoC). We propose two architectural variants. The first is named the Unidirectional NoC (UDN), where the crossbar core is built using a NoC with input and output ports placed on two opposite sides of the fabric chip. Because of the chip pins layout, we improved the UDN architecture using a Multidirectional NoC (MDN) architecture, b