Increasing the throughput of an adaptive router in network-on-chip (NoC)

In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient mechanism to increase the throughput of an adaptive router in network-on-chip (NoC). One of the most serious disadvantages of fully adaptive wormhole routers is its performance degradation due to the routing decision time. The key idea to overcome this shortcoming is the use of different clocks in a head flit and body flits, because the body flits can be forwarded immediately and the FIFO usually operates faster than route decision logic in an adaptive router. The major contributions of this paper are: 1) a proposal of a simple and efficient mechanism to improve the performance of fully adaptive wormhole routers, 2) a quantitative evaluation of the proposed mechanism showing that the proposed one can support higher throughput than a conventional one, and 3) an evaluation of hardware overhead for the proposed router. In summary, the proposed clock boosting mechanism enhances the throughput of the original adaptive router by increasing the accepted load and decreasing the average latency in the region of effective bandwidth.