L2STAR: A Star Type level-2 2D Mesh architecture for NoC
Prasun Ghosal, Tuhin Subhra Das · 2012
Network topology and related routing policy play an important role to the improvement of overall performance of an on chip Network (NoC). A structural scalable interconnection architecture may significantly increase the performance of a NoC in terms of scalability, modularity, transport latency, parallelism and all other important metrics. Again, well-constructed network architecture may also balance load of the network and try to reduce the chance of causing a hot spot on the network. In this work, our primary objective was to design an efficient scalable NoC architecture to improve performance of a NoC in all these aspects. In this paper, we present a new architecture, called Star Type level-2 Mesh architecture (L2STAR), which is, very much similar to a Multilevel Mesh and Star Type 2D Mesh NoC architecture. Our proposed architecture reduces the network latency considerably and also tries to balance the load of the network and ensures that the packet will always reach the destination through the possible shortest, deadlock free path.