Topology Exploration for Long-Distance Communication

With the increase in the network size, the conventional network-on-chip (NoC) imposes high latency due to the lack of shorter paths between far nodes resulting in performance degradation. This paper proposes an alternative approach that improves performance for long-distance communication in a mesh NoC. The proposed method explores a new topology named “pseudo-3D mesh” in which a few new nodes are added in the upper layer of a 2D mesh NoC. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides acceptably high performance at the cost of little hardware over-head.