Design of an Efficient NoC Architecture using Millimeter-Wave Wireless Links

Sujay Deb1,  Kevin Chang1,  Amlan Ganguly2,  Xinmin Yu1,  Partha Pande1,  Christof Teuscher3,  Deuk Heo1,  Benjamin Belzer1
1Washington State University, 2Rochester Institute of Technology, 3Portland State University


Abstract

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) is an enabling technology to integrate large numbers of embedded cores on a single die. Traditional multi-core designs based on the NoC paradigm suffer from high latency and power dissipation as the system size scales up due to the inherent multi-hop nature of communication. The performance of NoC fabrics can be significantly enhanced by introducing long-range, low power, and high-bandwidth single-hop links between far apart cores. In this paper we present a design methodology and performance evaluation for a hierarchical small-world NoC with on-chip millimeter (mm)-wave wireless channels as long-range communication links. The proposed wireless NoC offers significantly better performance in terms of achievable bandwidth and energy dissipation compared to its conventional multi-hop non-hierarchical wired counterpart in both uniform and non-uniform traffic scenarios. The performance improvement is achieved through efficient data routing and an optimum placement of the wireless hubs and energy efficient transceiver design.