Mesh-star Hybrid NoC architecture with CDMA switch

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) concept has been proposed to replace conventional bus-based system architectures to create scalable and flexible future SoC designs. A 2D-mesh topology is one of the most frequently mentioned topologies for an NoC design due to its natural layout mapping onto an SoC. However, the 2D-mesh topology NoC has a hot-spot problem at the center of the network and presents difficulties in multicasting. In this paper, we propose a novel multicastable CDMA switch and an efficient mesh-star hybrid topology. This approach leads to reduced traffic at the center of the network and better performance with multicasting. Our switch has been synthesized using a 0.13µm CMOS technology library.