Scalability Study on Mesh Based Network on Chip

With the development of IC technology and the increasing processing power requirement, more and more processing cores are being integrated into one single chip. One of the key problems is the communication efficiency between the processing cores, and network on chip (NoC) has been proposed as prospect architecture. In this paper, scalability issue of 2-D mesh based NoC is analyzed. First, a mesh based NoC router using XY routing algorithm is designed and implemented in FPGA prototype. Second, 2*2 and 3*3 NoCs are constructed using the above router module, with each router connected to a processing core via the resource network interface (RNI). At last, pipelined matrixes multiplications and FFT are executed to evaluate the 2-D mesh based NoC performance, together with the router area overhead in the case of increasing processing nodes numbers. Experiments showed that 2-D mesh based NoC architecture is easy scalable in increasing processing nodes numbers with small resource overhead.