Evaluating the feasibility of centralized router for network on chip

Network-on-chip has been proposed to address the global interconnection problems of System-on-Chip. One of the key factors that affects performance of the network-on-chip is its topology. Mesh is the most popular topology because of its scalability and simplicity in physical implementation. But, their performance degrades with size scaling up due to extra hops. Centralized router is proposed as a candidate to overcome the regular topologies drawbacks. This paper discusses the feasibility of a centralized router to replace distributed network-on-chip. A complete evaluation for centralized router and mesh topology is performed over various network-on-chip sizes and different evaluation parameters. Results show that centralized router outperforms in large scale size at the expense of area and power, while in small sizes it outperforms overall evaluation parameters.