A novel priority-driven arbiter for the router in reconfigurable Network-on-Chips

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm has been emerging as new communication solution for the Ultra Large-Scale Integration System-on-Chips (SoCs). Many real-time embedded SoCs support multi-rate applications that requires the NoC has to offer different Quality-of-Service level. This paper proposes and implements a reconfigurable hybrid router that combines the hybrid switching scheme with the priority-driven arbitration mechanism. The router supports both guaranteed-throughput (GT) service and best-effort (BE) service without reserving resources for GT service. In addition, the proposed solution not only guarantees GT-type QoS, but also enhance the average performance for BE service by using communication resources efficiently. The router has been modelled and then implemented on Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA technology. The obtained results show that this router can guarantee reliability and enhance significantly the average performance of BE load compared with the generic router while the overheads in terms of area and power consumption are acceptable.