Exploring concentration and channel slicing in on-chip network router

Sharing on-chip network resources efficiently is critical in the design of a cost-efficient network on-chip (NoC). Concentration has been proposed for on-chip networks but the trade-off in concentration implementation and performance has not been well understood. In this paper, we describe cost-efficient implementations of concentration and show how external concentration provides a significant reduction in complexity (47% and 36% reduction in area and energy, respectively) compared to previous assumed integrated (high-radix) concentration while degrading overall performance by only 10%. Hybrid implementations of concentration is also presented which provide additional tradeoff between complexity and performance. To further reduce the cost of NoC, we describe how channel slicing can be used together with concentration. We propose virtual concentration which further reduces the complexity - saving area and energy by 69% and 32% compared to baseline mesh and 88% and 35% over baseline concentrated mesh.