Linköping Studies in Science and Technology Dissertation No. 1130 Performance and Energy Efficient Network-on-Chip Architectures Sriram R. Vangal Electronic Devices Department of Electrical Engineering Linköping University, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden Linköping 2007 ISBN 978-91-85895-91-5 ISSN 0345-7524 ii Performance and Energy Efficient Network-on-Chip Architectures Sriram R. Vangal ISBN 978-91-85895-91-5 Copyright Sriram. R. Vangal, 2007 Linköping Studies in Science and Technology Dissertation No. 1130 ISSN 0345-7524 Electronic Devices Department of Electrical Engineering Linköping University, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden Linköping 2007 Author email:
[email protected] Cover Image A chip microphotograph of the industry’s first programmable 80-tile teraFLOPS processor, which is implemented in a 65-nm eight-metal CMOS technology. Printed by LiU-Tryck, Linköping University Linköping, Sweden, 2007 Abstract The scaling of MOS transistors into the nanometer regime opens the possibility for creating large Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures containing hundreds of integrated processing elements with on-chip communication. NoC architectures, with structured on-chip networks are emerging as a scalable and modular solution to global communications within large systems-on-chip. NoCs mitigate the emerging wire-delay problem and addresses the need for substantial interconnect bandwidth by replacing today’s shared buses with packet-switched router networks. With on-chip communication consuming a significant portion of the chip power and area budgets, there is a compelling need for compact, low power routers. While applications dictate the choice of the compute core, the advent of multimedia applications, such as three-dimensional (3D) graphics and signal processing, places stronger demands for self-contained, low-latency floating-point processors with increased throughput.