Bubble coloring
Ruisheng Wang, Lizhong Chen, Timothy Mark Pinkston · 2013
Handling routing- and protocol-induced deadlocks is a critical issue in designing a reliable communication system. Generally, to avoid these two types of deadlocks without losing routing freedom requires a large amount of virtual channels (VCs), which imposes significant negative effects on router power, energy and frequency. In this paper, we propose a virtual cut-through switched Bubble Coloring (BC) scheme, which can avoid both routing- and protocol-induced deadlocks and allow fully adaptive routing on any topology without the need for multiple virtual channels. Results from both synthetic and full-system simulation show that, compared to a conventional deadlock-free scheme with 4VCs (i.e., XY_adaptive_4VC), our BC scheme with the minimal 1VC (i.e., BC_1VC) can reduce router energy and area by up to 51.2% and 58.3%, respectively, and has comparable performance at the same time. As the proposed BC scheme does not require multiple virtual channels, it also reduces the complexity of router arbitration logic, which brings the opportunity to increase router frequency and further improve system performance.