Evaluation of buffer organizations for network-on-chip

Network-on-chip (NoC) is becoming increasingly important in designing a system with a large number of modules. Among many important issues, buffer organization of router is one of the most critical issues since it determines the area of the routers, and also affects the system performance significantly. In this paper, we evaluate and compare the NoC performance for several different allocations of virtual channels and channel buffer sizes under fixed buffer resources, to guide the design of buffer organization. The experiment results reveal that moderate number of virtual channels is optimal.