Breaking adaptive multicast deadlock by virtual channel address/data FIFO decoupling

As computing goes to system-on-chip era, on-chip network becomes an essential infrastructure for on-chip modules (cores) communication. 2D-Mesh is the most common on-chip network topology providing high throughput point-to-point communication due to its simplicity and regularity. A well-designed 2D-Mesh wormhole router should be deadlock free while supporting multicast and adaptive routing. Unfortunately, there exists no router design providing all these characteristics concurrently. In this paper, we propose an on-chip address-data decoupled FIFO wormhole router which supports adaptive routing, native multicast and deadlock free network guarantee. For a network using a 30-flit packet, our wormhole router increases the area efficiency by 49.5% compared with a virtual cut-through router.