Trading Hardware Overhead for Communication Performance in Mesh-Type Topologies

Several alternatives of mesh-type topologies have been published for the use in Networks-on-Chip. Due to their regularity, mesh-type topologies often serve as a foundation to investigate new ideas or to customize the topology to application-specific needs. This paper analyzes existing mesh-type topologies and compares their characteristics in terms of communication and implementation costs. Furthermore, this paper proposes BEAM (Border-Enhanced Mesh) − a mesh-type topology for Networks-on-Chip. BEAM uses concentration while necessitating only low-radix routers. Thereto, additional resources are connected to the outer boundaries of a conventional mesh. As a result, overall bandwidth is traded off against hardware overhead. In conclusion, simulation and synthesis results show that the conventional mesh stands out due to its communication performance, whereas clustered and concentrated topologies offer the least hardware overhead. BEAM ranges in between and is an option to balance hardware costs and communication performance.