ARB-NET: A novel adaptive monitoring platform for stacked mesh 3D NoC architectures

The emerging three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs) offer a promising solution to mitigate the barriers of interconnect scaling in modern systems. In order to exploit the intrinsic capability of reducing the wire length in 3D ICs, 3D NoC-Bus Hybrid mesh architecture was proposed. Besides its various advantages in terms of area, power consumption, and performance, this architecture has a unique and hitherto previously unexplored way to implement an efficient system-wide monitoring network. In this paper, an integrated low-cost monitoring platform for 3D stacked mesh architectures is proposed which can be efficiently used for various system management purposes. The proposed generic monitoring platform called ARB-NET utilizes bus arbiters to exchange the monitoring information directly with each other without using the data network. As a test case, based on the proposed monitoring platform, a fully congestion-aware adaptive routing algorithm named AdaptiveXYZ is presented taking advantage from viable information generated within bus arbiters. Our extensive simulations with synthetic and real benchmarks reveal that our architecture using the AdaptiveXYZ routing can help achieving significant power and performance improvements compared to recently proposed stacked mesh 3D NoCs.