DLABS: a Dual-Lane Buffer-Sharing Router Architecture for Networks on Chip

Abstract:

A signi?cant portion of the conventional router?s area is
dedicated to its buffers at the input/output ports. For regular workloads,
however, a large number of buffers are always idle while other buffers
are always busy. This observation motivates us to design a new router
architecture which allows buffers to be shared by multiple input ports.
This architecture keeps buffers busy while working together to forward
data, reducing the busy cycle times and pressure on each buffer, resulting
in an improvement of the overall network performance. Sharing resources
like buffers, however, has the potential of causing deadlock in the
network. In this work, we propose a dual-lane architecture that is
deadlock-free for our buffer-sharing routers, named DLABS (Dual-Lane
Buffer-Sharing) routers. We design three DLABS routers and compare
against a conventional wormhole router. Experimental results show the
smallest DLABS router occupies an area of only 0.62% of a conventional
router, but achieves 108% on the throughput per area (TPA) over regular
traf?c benchmarks. The largest DLABS router occupies 112% of the
circuit area of the conventional router, but achieves 164% on the TPA.

Paper

  PDF (384 KB),   (c) Copyright, 2010, IEEE

Presentation Slides

• PDF (642 KB),   (c) Copyright, 2010

Reference

Anh T. Tran, Bevan M. Baas, "DLABS: a Dual-Lane Buffer-Sharing Router Architecture for Networks on Chip," IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS), Oct 2010, pp.331-336.

BibTeX Entry

@INPROCEEDINGS{Tran:SiPS2010,
   author={Tran, A.T. and Baas, B.M.},
   booktitle={Signal Processing Systems, 2010. SiPS 2010. IEEE Workshop on}, 
   title={{DLABS}: a Dual-Lane Buffer-Sharing Router Architecture for Networks on Chip},
   year={2010},
   month={Oct.},
   pages={331-336}
}