A comparison of two multistage ring architectures for NoC using high-level simulation models

Abstract

This paper uses high-level simulation models written in SystemC to compare the performance characteristics of two wormhole-routed multistage ring architectures: a hierarchical ring and a two-dimensional hyper ring. The hierarchical ring architecture has a single global ring, which limits its bisection bandwidth. The hyper ring is presented as an improvement over the hierarchical ring, whereby a second global ring is used to double the bisection bandwidth. Furthermore, a ldquofatrdquo variant of each architecture is considered, which use bidirectional global rings to increase the bisection bandwidth of the original architectures.