Combined packet and TDM circuit switching NoCs with novel connection configuration mechanism

In this paper we present a router that combines the circuit switching and packet switching in order to efficiently and separately handle the guaranteed-service and best-effort traffics. The main innovation consists in proposing a novel connection configuration mechanism, in which the source node first sends the connection request to manager via a pre-reserved request path, and the manager sends back the response message via guaranteed-service path. Hence, the additional dedicated configuration network that is widely used in previous works is avoided, which reduces the hardware cost while still guaranteeing the configuration latency. The synthesis results show our approach is more area and energy efficient. Compared to previous works, our approach can provide up to 260% better power efficiency and 2.4X to 5X better area efficiency. In terms of configuration time, our approach can provide 2.7X to 36X faster configuration speed.