An area-efficient partially reconfigurable crossbar switch with low reconfiguration delay

With the increasing number of processors in Multiprocessor System-on-Chips (MPSoCs), Network-on-Chips (NoCs) are replacing conventional buses as the interprocessor communication architecture. Since different use cases might be running on MPSoCs, there is a need for dynamically reconfigurable NoC. However, most dynamically reconfigurable NoCs have a large area overhead due to the additional reconfiguration logic. While recently some dynamically reconfigurable NoCs have been proposed based on partial reconfiguration (PR), they have high reconfiguration delay and require off-line bitstream generation for all possible scenarios. The problem lies with the design of the crossbar switch, which is the fundamental component of a NoC. In this paper, a novel partially reconfigurable crossbar switch design with low area requirement, low reconfiguration delay and runtime bitstream generation is presented. The crossbar switch is built from lookup tables (LUTs), and reconfiguration is done by modifying the LUTs´ content through PR. Reconfiguration delay is minimized by constraining the placement of the LUTs into the least number of configurable logic block columns and identifying the configuration frames that are responsible for LUTs´ content. The novel crossbar switch design achieves an area saving of up to 84% and reconfiguration delay minimization of up to 78%. It can be used to realize any network topology, and Clos, Benes and single stage crossbar topologies are evaluated in the paper.