Dynamic TDM virtual circuit implementation for NoC

Quality-of-Service (QoS) communication has been a key issue since the birth of Network-on-Chip (NoC). Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) techniques are well recognized to be capable of providing guarantees in latency and bandwidth. However, current TDM VC proposals assume synchronous operation and use a costly slot allocation table to statically allocate bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a novel TDM VC implementation that releases the strict synchronous operation assumption and computes slot allocation fully dynamically. To promise VC contention-free, we use the Logical Network theory to guide the slot computation. The slot allocation information is computed once and propagated downstream. This enables adaptive VC configuration and also allows us to use smaller allocation tables in routers. We describe our dynamic TDM VC implementation mechanism, and detail the router design to support this mechanism.