Enhancing Performance of 3D Interconnection Networks using Efficient Multicast Communication Protocol

Three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs) offer greater device integration, reduced signal delay and reduced interconnect power. They also provide greater design flexibility by allowing heterogeneous integration. In order to exploit the intrinsic capability of reducing the wire length in 3D ICs, 3D NoC-Bus Hybrid mesh architecture was proposed. This architecture provides a seemingly significant platform to implement efficient multicast routings for 3D networks-on-chip. In this paper, we propose a novel multicast partitioning and routing strategy for the 3D NoC-Bus Hybrid mesh architectures to enhance the overall system performance and reduce the power consumption. The proposed architecture exploits the beneficial attribute of a single-hop (bus-based) interlayer communication of the 3D stacked mesh architecture to provide high-performance hardware multicast support. To this end, a customized partitioning method and an efficient routing algorithm are presented to reduce the average hop count and latency of the network. Compared to the recently proposed 3D NoC architectures being capable of supporting hardware multicasting, our extensive simulations with different traffic profiles reveal that our architecture using the proposed multicast routing strategy can help achieve significant performance improvements.