Long-Distance Communication via Pseudo-3D Networks-on-Chip

Conventional mesh-based interconnection architecture is simple to implement and verify. However, with the increase in nodes and network size, the architecture imposes high latency due to the lack of shorter paths between far nodes. This paper finds an alternative approach that improves performance for long-distance communication in a mesh NoC. The proposed method offers a variant of the 2D mesh topology named “pseudo-3D mesh” in which a few new nodes are added in the upper layer of a 2D mesh NoC. Rigorous simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides acceptably high performance at the cost of little hardware overhead. Further, the proposed method improves the global and local packet latency by 19% and 24%, respectively, compared to a conventional 2D 7 × 7 mesh NoC. Consequently, packet loss is improved by 50%, accelerating nearly 43% throughput gain and 47% energy consumption reduction.