A Hybrid Router Combining SDM-Based Circuit Swictching with Packet Switching for On-chip Networks

We propose in this paper a hybrid router architecture which combines Spatial Division Multiplexing “SDM”-based circuit switching and packet switching in order to efficiently and separately handle both streaming and best-effort traffics generated in real-time applications. The SDM approach is used in circuit switching in order to increase path diversity, thus improving throughput while mitigating the low resource utilization inherent to circuit switching. In this way Quality of Service “QoS” is easily provided without sharing resources. The proposed hybrid router architecture has been synthesized on a FPGA and results show that increasing the number of sub-channels in a SDM-Channel does not considerably impact the area and the maximum clock frequency of the design. A 7×7 mesh NoC was simulated in SystemC. Simulation results show that the probability of path establishment increases with the number of sub-channels.