Key Techniques of Multicast Communication for Network on Chip

With the increase of communications between lots of cores, traditional unicast communication is not enough to satisfy on-chip application requirements . Multicast communication rarely considered in NoC, can ease the resource burden, use the bandwidth efficiently in order to achieve cache coherency protocol to support faster and more efficient collective communication. Several typical multicast routing and deadlock avoidance algorithms are provided and the popular multicast mechanisms for NoC are compared and analyzed respectively. Simulation experiments show that the multicast has smaller network latency, average hops, applied load per router and better link utilization than unicast without congestion. Then, a new prediction based congestion avoidance scheme for multicast communication of NoC is proposed. So, it is a good approach to improve NoC performance by employing multicast support mechanism effectively.