Abstract:

A buffer allocation algorithm for wormhole routing networks-on-chip was proposed. When the total budget of the available buffering space is fixed, the proposed algorithm automatically will, according to the traffic characteristics of the target application, assign the buffer depth for each input channel in different routers across the chip. The simulation results show that the buffer allocation result is more reasonable and smaller average packet latency can be achieved compared to the uniform buffer allocation. For hotspot traffic, about 17% savings in buffering resources can be achieved using our algorithm.

Key words: wormhole routing, networks-on-chip, buffer allocation algorithm