FiRot: An Efficient Crosstalk Mitigation Method for Network-on-Chips

Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient cross talk mitigation method for Network-on-Chips (NoCs). The proposed method investigates flits in each packet to minimize the number of harmful transition patterns appearing on the communication channels of NoC. To do this, the content of every flit is rotated with respect to the previously flit sent through the channel. Rotation is done to find a rotated version of the flit which minimizes the number of harmful transition patterns. A tag field is added into the rotated flit to enable the receiving side to recover the original flit. Maximum number of rotations is bounded by a fixed value to minimize the timing and power overheads of the proposed method. Evaluation of the proposed method is done in both analytical and simulation manners. VHDL-based simulations are carried out for several channel widths and several tag widths. Simulation results confirm that the proposed method effectively overcomes the cross talk problem while its timing and power overheads are negligible. Results of analytical evaluation are also in agreement with the simulation results.