Virtual Point-to-Point Links in Packet-Switched NoCs

A method to setup virtual point-to-point links between the cores of a packet-switched network-on-chip is presented in this paper which aims at reducing the NoC power consumption and delay. The router architecture proposed in this paper provides packet-switching, as well as a number of virtual point-to-point, or VIP (VIrtual Point-to-point) for short, connections. This is achieved by designating one virtual channel at each physical channel of a router to bypass the router pipeline. The mapping and routing algorithm exploits these virtual channels and tries to virtually connect the source and destination nodes of high-volume communication flows during task-graph mapping and route selection phase of the NoC design process. The evaluation results show a significant reduction in power and latency over a traditional packet-switched NoC.