Switching at flit level: A Congestion Efficient Flow Control Strategy for Network-on-Chip
Avik Bose, Prasun Ghosal · 2020
The proposed work demonstrates a novel flow control mechanism that brings the flexibility to route every flit of a packet independently, alleviating the network congestion more efficiently in Virtual Channel (VC) based NoC routing. A 100% buffer utilization is achieved by putting an end to the overhead of VC arbitration. The modified router design comes with a 20% area and 4.73% energy saving on the generic one. Packet Latency improvement of 35 -78 %, 27 - 68%, and 45 - 62% is observed over the mesh, torus, and flattened butterfly topologies respectively under uniform random traffic. The average packet drop rate is reduced by a minimum of 28% across the above topologies.