Dynamically reconfigurable on-chip communication architectures for multi use-case chip multiprocessor applications

The phenomenon of digital convergence and increasing application complexity today is motivating the design of chip multiprocessor (CMP) applications with multiple use cases. Most traditional on-chip communication architecture design techniques perform synthesis and optimization only for a single use-case, which may lead to sub-optimal design decisions for multi-use case applications. In this paper we present a framework to generate a dynamically reconfigurable crossbar-based on-chip communication architecture that can support multiple use-case bandwidth and latency constraints. Our framework generates on-chip communication architectures with a low cost, low power dissipation, and with minimal reconfiguration overhead. Results of applying our framework on several networking CMP applications show that our approach is able to generate a crossbar solution with significantly lower cost (2.4times to 3.8times), and lower power dissipation (1.5times to 3.1times), compared to the best previously proposed approach.