Asynchronous spatial division multiplexing router

Wei Song and Doug Edward

Abstract

Asynchronous quasi-delay-insensitive (QDI) NoCs have several advantages over the ir clocked counterparts. Virtual channel (VC) is the most utilized flow control method in asynchronous routers but spatial division multiplexing (SDM) achieves better throughput performance for best effort traffic than VC. A novel asynchron ous SDM router architecture is presented. Area and latency models are provided to analyse the network performance of all router architectures including wormhole, virtual channel and SDM. Performance comparisons have been made with different configurations of payload size, communication distance, buffer size, port bandwidth, network size and number of VCs/virtual circuits. Compared with VC, SDM achieves higher throughput with lower area overhead.