Bidirectional interconnect design for low latency high bandwidth NoC

This paper presents a bidirectional interconnect design which achieves significant reduction in area and power by allowing for simultaneous transmission and reception of signals on a single interconnect segment. The proposed interconnect design achieves twice the throughput with the same link width. We have modeled the bi-directional link on the 7×7 cycle accurate NoC design. We have explored the latency for synthetic and realistic SPLASH-2 benchmarks. Synthetic benchmark results show that bidirectional design does exceedingly well in high congestion. Combination of realistic benchmarks shows that bidirectional design does much better with latency whenever the injection level of the combined benchmark is higher.