230104

In deflection-based Network-on-Chips (NoC), when several flits entering a router contend for the same output port, one of the flits is routed to the desired output and the others are deflected to alternatives outputs. The approach reduces power consumption and silicon footprint in comparison to virtual channels (VCs) based solutions. However, due to the nondeterministic number of deflections that flits may suffer while traversing the network, flits may be received in an out-of-order fashion at their destinations. In this work, we present IPDeN, a novel deflectionbased NoC that ensures in-order flit delivery. To avoid the use of costly reordering mechanisms at the destination of each communication flow, we propose a solution based on a single small buffer added to each router to prevents flits from over taking other flits belonging to the same communication flow. We also develop a worst-case traversal time (WCTT) analysis for packets transmitted over IPDeN. We implemented IPDeN in Verilog and synthesized it for an FPGA platform. We show that a router of IPDeN requires "483-times less hardware resources than routers that use VCs. Experimental results shown that the worst-case and average packets communication time is reduced in comparison to the state-of-the-artThis work was partially supported by National Funds through FCT/MCTES (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), within the CISTER Research Unit (UIDP/UIDB/04234/2020); by FCT and the ESF (European Social Fund) through the Regional Operational Programme (ROP) Norte 2020, under PhD grant 2020.06898.BD.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

HopliteBuf FPGA Network-on-Chip: Architecture and Analysis

We can prove occupancy bounds of stall-free FIFOs used in deflection-free, low-cost, and high-speed FPGA overlay Network-on-chips (NoCs). In our work, we build on top of the HopliteRT livelock-free overlay NoC with an FPGA-friendly 2D unidirectional torus topology to propose the novel HopliteBuf NoC. In our new NoC, we strategically introduce stall-free FIFOs in the network and support these FIFOs with static analysis based on network calculus to compute FIFO occupancy, latency, and bandwidth bounds. The microarchitecture of HopliteBuf combines the performance benefits of conventional buffered NoCs (high throughput, low latency) with the cost advantages of deflection-routed NoCs (low FPGA area, high clock frequencies). Specifically, we look at two design variants of the HopliteBuf NoC: (1) Single corner-turn FIFO (W to S), and (2) Dual corner-turn FIFO (W to S+N). The single corner-turn (W to S) design is simpler and only introduces a buffering requirement for packets changing dimension from X ring to the downhill Y ring (or West to South). The dual corner-turn variant requires two FIFOs for turning packets going downhill (W to S) as well as uphill (W to N). The dual corner-turn design overcomes the mathematical analysis challenges associated with single corner-turn designs for communication workloads with cyclic dependencies between flow traversal paths at the expense of small increase in resource cost. Essentially, we resolve an analysis challenge with extra hardware resources. Across a range of 100 synthetically-generated workloads on a 5 x 5 NoC, HopliteBuf outperforms HopliteRT by 1.2-2x in terms of latency, 10% in terms of injection rate, and 30-60% in terms of flowset feasibiliy. These advantages come at the cost of 3-4x higher FPGA resource requirement for buffers and muxes. Our analysis also deliver latency bounds that are not only better than HopliteRT in absolute terms but also tighter by 2-3x allowing us to provision less hardware to meet our specifications