UniMESH: The light-weight unidirectional channel Network-on-Chip in 2D mesh topology

Power consumption, design complexity and areacost are limiting constraints in the design of interconnect for scalable many-core systems. To tackle the power and area concerns, we propose a light-weight unidirectional channel network-on-chip in 2D mesh topology (UniMESH), which simplifies router architectures, uses only half amount of channel links to guarantee a fully connected topology, and adopts a novel routing algorithm and deadlock recovery mechanism. As a result, it can reduce both design complexity and area-cost, and decrease some unwanted power consumption. Evaluations show that the proposed light-weight UniMESH can reduce 57.4% router areas, and save 39.3% total power consumption and only add few extra latency when compared with conventional 2D mesh design in SPLASH application simulations.