Wave-Pipelined Source-Synchronous Circuit-Switched Data Transmission
Sebastian Fischer, Amir Hosein Najafi, Alberto García-Ortiz · 2023
In modern nanometric technologies, communication is a key limiting factor in a system in terms of energy and performance. Networks-on-Chip (NoC) is a commonly used approach to address these limitations, but worst-case delay and clock speed limit the standard synchronous approach. Alternatively, source-synchronous NoC can take advantage of fast links and increase performance, but link delay severely limits current approaches. In this paper, we propose three techniques to increase the performance of source-synchronous NoCs using the concept of wave-pipelining. The proposed techniques exploit the idle time in the source-synchronous mechanism when the sender and receiver should be waiting for the request and acknowledgment signals. The proposed techniques offer an increase in performance up to a factor of 3.