Modified CONNECT: New Bufferless Router for NoC-Based FPGAs

• Published in: 2018 IEEE 61st International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS) pp. 424 - 427
• Main Authors: Shaheen, Marwa, Fahmy, Hossam, Mostafa, Hassan
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.08.2018
• Subjects: Field programmable gate arrays; Pipelines; Registers; Resource management; Round robin; Routing; Switches
• ISSN: 1558-3899
• DOI: 10.1109/MWSCAS.2018.8624076

As Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs) scale to tens or hundreds of nodes, the interconnect becomes a significant factor in cost, energy consumption and performance. Energy efficiency of the underlying communication framework plays a major role in the performance of multi-core systems. Recent work proposes buffer-less deflection routing as a cost effective alternative. A modified version of CONfigurable NETwork Creation Tool(CONNECT) is proposed as a buffer-less router to be lightweight and efficient. Modified CONNECT is based on parallel port allocation mechanism within the routers, that allows maximum number of flits to be deflected in a productive direction. Modified CONNECT is evaluated using uniform, transpose and inverse traffic workloads against CONNECT, BLESS and Cheap- Interconnect Partially Permuting Router (CHIPPER) on a 4×4 mesh network. Modified CONNECT saves 30% area compared to CONNECT while employing lower performance. Modified CONNECT also saves 24% in area against BLESS keeping the same performance.