Go to main content

School of Computer Science Intranet

APT research areas

Discover our main research areas

Quality-of-Service (QoS) for Asynchronous On-Chip Networks

Tomaz Felicijan

Abstract

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are emerging as a new design paradigm to tackle the challenge of managing the complexity of designing chips containing billions of transistors. One of the key features of a modern NoC is the ability of the interconnect to provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) capabilities in order to accommodate different components with strict traffic characteristics and constraints. However, the adoption of NoCs as the solution for global interconnect still raises the question of which clocking strategy to use. While local wires scale in length with a technology, global wires spanning an entire chip do not – exactly the situation that leads to clock skew problems.

One way to eliminate this problem is to use asynchronous logic for an on-chip network implementation. This leaves only the issue of connecting synchronous components to an asynchronous network. Furthermore, properties such as low power, improved electromagnetic (EMC) and robustness, offer additional benefits from the use of self-timed logic for on-chip interconnect.

The research presented in this thesis describes an asynchronous on-chip network router with QoS support. The router employs a virtual channel architecture together with a priority-based scheduler to provide time-related guarantees. The resulting QoS architecture is suitable for on-chip implementation because of its low complexity and low area overhead.

Simulation results show that the proposed architecture utilizing self-timed logic is capable of providing time-related quarantees such as minimum bandwidth and bounded communication latency.

The thesis is available as PDF (1.1MB).