A deterministic, minimal routing algorithm for a toroidal, rectangular honeycomb topology using a 2-tupled relative address

The topology and channel width in Network-on-Chips (NoC) impacts the throughput and latency and therefore the area of deployment. In this paper an NoC based on a three dimensional, toroidal rectangular honeycomb topology using a two tupled (x, y) address, is discussed. It employs a minimal and deterministic routing algorithm utilizing Virtual Channels (VC) to be deadlock free. The performance of this topology is analyzed by integrating the NoC into a multi-core Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) called REDEFINE [1], [2] executing real-life applications such as CRC, AES and ECP. Further the area and power consumptions of NoC routers integrated in honeycomb, mesh and hexagonal/triangular topologies are compared. The results show that a honeycomb topology with its lowest degree, does not always perform worst when compared to the other topologies as suggested by synthetic traffic generators. This can lead to an efficient System-on-Chip (SoC) design in which area and power is reduced by approximately 11% and 7% respectively when compared to an NoC with a mesh topology.