Selected Transition Time Adjustment for Tolerating Crosstalk Effects on Network-on-Chip Interconnects

With the shrink of technology to the nanometer scale, network-on-chip (NOC) has become a reasonable solution for connecting many cores on a single chip. It suffers however from increasingly serious interconnect crosstalk effects, which constrain the overall performance of NOC systems. In this paper, a crosstalk tolerance method is proposed for reducing bus delay on NOC interconnects. Crosstalk-induced latency is predicted by analyzing the possible crosstalk effects of adjacent patterns stored in an NOC router. Transition times of selected bits are then adjusted to relieve these predicted crosstalk-induced effects. Experimental results on interconnects show that the proposed method can achieve the same bus delay reduction as the insertion of extra shielding wires into two adjacent wires, while the proposed method requires no extra wires. Compared with previous methods using a dual rail code, a crosstalk avoidance code, and/or a variable clock, the proposed approach provides a larger reduction of bus delay with less area overhead.