Traffic steering between a low-latency unswitched TL ring and a high-throughput switched on-chip interconnect

Growth in core count creates an increasing demand for interconnect bandwidth, driving a change from shared buses to packet-switched on-chip interconnects. However, this increases the latency between cores separated by many links and switches. In this paper, we show that a low-latency unswitched interconnect built with transmission lines can be synergistically used with a high-throughput switched interconnect. First, we design a broadcast ring as a chain of unidirectional transmission line structures with very low latency but limited throughput. Then, we create a new adaptive packet steering policy that judiciously uses the limited throughput of this ring by balancing expected latency benefit and ring utilization. Although the ring uses 1.3% of the on-chip metal area, our experimental results show that, in combination with our steering, it provides an execution time reduction of 12.4% over a mesh-only baseline.