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A survey of routing algorithm for mesh Network-on-Chip

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Abstract

With the rapid development of semiconductor industry, the number of cores integrated on chip increases quickly, which brings tough challenges such as bandwidth, scalability and power into on-chip interconnection. Under such background, Network-on-Chip (NoC) is proposed and gradually replacing the traditional on-chip interconnections such as sharing bus and crossbar. For the convenience of physical layout, mesh is the most used topology in NoC design. Routing algorithm, which decides the paths of packets, has significant impact on the latency and throughput of network. Thus routing algorithm plays a vital role in a wellperformed network. This study mainly focuses on the routing algorithms of mesh NoC. By whether taking network information into consideration in routing decision, routing algorithms of NoC can be roughly classified into oblivious routing and adaptive routing. Oblivious routing costs less without adaptiveness while adaptive routing is on the contrary. To combine the advantages of oblivious and adaptive routing algorithm, half-adaptive algorithms were proposed. In this paper, the concepts, taxonomy and features of routing algorithms of NoC are introduced. Then the importance of routing algorithms in mesh NoC is highlighted, and representative routing algorithms with respective features are reviewed and summarized. Finally, we try to shed light upon the future work of NoC routing algorithms.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Computer Architecture, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Yue Wu & Yunji Chen

  2. School of Computer and Control Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 101408, China

    Yue Wu & Chao Lu

  3. Loongson Technology Corporation Limited, Beijing, 100095, China

    Chao Lu

Authors
  1. Yue Wu
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  2. Chao Lu
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  3. Yunji Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yunji Chen.

Additional information

Yue Wu received the BS degree in statistics from University of Science and Technology of China, China in 2006. He is currently a PhD candidate of Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. His main research interests include computer architecture, computational intelligence and network on chip.

Chao Lu received the BE degree in EE from University of Science and Technology of China, China in 2006. He is currently a PhD candidate of Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. His main research interests include computer architecture, and network on chip.

Yunji Chen was graduated from the Special Class for the Gifted Young, University of Science and Technology of China, China in 2002. He received the PhD degree in computer science from Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China in 2007. He is currently a professor at ICT, CAS. He was the awardee of the NSFC Excellent Young Scholars Program in 2012. His research interests include parallel computing, microarchitecture, hardware verification, and computational intelligence.

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Wu, Y., Lu, C. & Chen, Y. A survey of routing algorithm for mesh Network-on-Chip. Front. Comput. Sci. 10, 591–601 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-016-5431-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-016-5431-8

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