DCM: An IP for the autonomous control of optical and electrical reconfigurable NoCs

The increasing requirements for bandwidth and quality-of-service motivate the use of parallel interconnect architectures with several degrees of reconfiguration. This paper presents an IP, called Distributed Channel Management (DCM), to extend existing packet-switched NoCs with a reconfigurable point-to-point network seamlessly, i.e., without the need for any modification on the routers. The configuration of the reconfigurable network takes place dynamically and autonomously, so that the topology can be changed at run time. Furthermore, the architecture is scalable due to the autonomous decentralized administration of the links. The Paper reports a thorough experimental analysis of the overhead of the approach at the gate level that considers different network parameters such as flit size and timing constraints.