A-WiNoC: Adaptive Wireless Network-on-Chip Architecture for Chip Multiprocessors

Document Type

Article

Subject Area(s)

Electrical engineering

Abstract

With the rise of chip multiprocessors, an energy-efficient communication fabric is required to satisfy the data rate requirements of future multi-core systems. The Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm is fast becoming the standard communication infrastructure to provide scalable inter-core communication. However, research has shown that metallic interconnects cause high latency and consume excess energy in NoC architectures. Emerging technologies such as on-chip wireless interconnects can alleviate the power and bandwidth problems of traditional metallic NoCs. In this paper, we propose A-WiNoC, a scalable, adaptable wireless Network-on-Chip architecture that uses energy efficient wireless transceivers and improves network throughput by dynamically re-assigning channels in response to bandwidth demands from different cores. To implement such adaptability in our network at run-time, we propose an adaptable algorithm that works in the background along with a token sharing scheme to fully utilize the wireless bandwidth efficiently. Since no wireless NoC design has been completely realized with current technology, we describe technology trends in designing energy-efficient wireless transceivers with emerging technologies. We compare our proposed A-WiNoC to both wireless and wired topologies at 64 cores, with results showing a 1.4-2.6× speedup on real applications and a 54 percent improvement in throughput for synthetic traffic. Using Synopsys Design Compiler, our results indicate that A-WiNoC saves 25-35 percent energy over other state-of-the-art networks. We show that A-WiNoC can scale to 256 cores with an energy improvement of 21 percent and a saturation throughput increase of approximately 37 percent.

Rights

© IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2015, IEEE

DiTomaso, D., Kodi, A., Matolak, D., Kaya, S., Laha, S., Rayess, W. (2015). A-WiNoC: Adaptive Wireless Network-on-Chip Architecture for Chip Multiprocessors. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 26(12), 3289-3302.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2014.2383384

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