MINI-ESPADA: A Low-Cost Fully Adaptive Routing Mechanism for Networks-on-Chips
Résumé
With NoCs (Networks-on-Chips) becoming a central part of today’s many-core systems, ensuring a good level of performance at the routing level has never been so crucial. In previous works, we have introduced a novel method for designing fully adaptive deadlock-free routing algorithms for NoCs called ESPADA (EScape PAths with Dynamic channel Acquisition). The strength of our approach lies in its ability to simultaneously utilize the available virtual channels for throughput enhancement and deadlock-avoidance, thereby enabling high- coverage fault-tolerance at a much higher performance than state-of-the art techniques. In this paper, we further highlight the potentials of this approach and its suitability for low-cost designs, by using it to build MINI-ESPADA, an enhanced version of the popular DyXY algorithm that routes packets following available minimal paths while exploiting the properties of ESPADA to offer higher throughput. In addition to a significant perfo!
rmance improvement, we report a negligible area overhead with respects to the classic XY and DyXY when using the same number of virtual channels.
