A verilog-hdl implementation of virtual channels in a network-on-chip router

As the feature size is continuously decreasing and integration density is increasing, interconnections have become a dominating factor in determining the overall quality of a chip. Due to the limited scalability of system bus, it cannot meet the requirement of current System-on-Chip (SoC) implementations where only a limited number of functional units can be supported. Long global wires also cause many design problems, such as routing congestion, noise coupling, and difficult timing closure. Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures have been proposed to be an alternative to solve the above problems by using a packet-based communication network. The processing elements (PEs) communicate with each other by exchanging messages over the network and these messages go through buffers in each router. Buffers are one of the major resource used by the routers in virtual channel flow control. In this thesis, we analyze two kinds of buffer allocation approaches, static and dynamic buffer allocations. These approaches aim to increase throughput and minimize latency by means of virtual channel flow control. In statically allocated buffer architecture, size and organization are design time decisions and thus, do not perform optimally for all traffic conditions. In addition, statically allocated virtual channel consumes a waste of area and significant leakage power. However, dynamic buffer allocation scheme claims that buffer utilization can be increased using dynamic virtual channels. Dynamic virtual channel regulator (ViChaR), have been proposed to use centralized buffer architecture which dynamically allocates virtual channels and buffer slots in real-time depending on traffic conditions. This ViChaR?s dynamic buffer management scheme increases buffer utilization, but it also increases design complexity. In this research, we reexamine performance, power consumption, and area of ViChaR?s buffer architecture through implementation. We implement a generic router and a ViChaR architecture using Verilog-HDL. These RTL codes are verified by dynamic simulation, and synthesized by Design Compiler to get area and power consumption. In addition, we get latency through Static Timing Analysis. The results show that a ViChaR?s dynamic buffer management scheme increases the latency and power consumption significantly even though it could increase buffer utilization. Therefore, we need a novel design to achieve high buffer utilization without a loss.