A Switch Supporting Circuit and Packet Switching for On-Chip Networks

The design of a hybrid switch for on-chip networks in SoC design is presented. This hybrid switch provides both guaranteed and best-effort communication services for network-on-chip architectures. We use the pre-scheduled circuit-switched network to support guaranteed communication service between IPs on the chip. In order to fully utilize the network bandwidth, we further incorporate the packet-switched architecture. Our design has been experimentally implemented using UMC 0.18 /spl mu/m technology. It has an aggregate bandwidth of 5 times 434MHz x 64 bits = 139 Gb/s. Compared to previous designs, our switch provides high performance with a reasonable cost