An ASIP Approach to Path Allocation in TDM NoCs using Adaptive Search Region

Dynamic connection allocation in time-division multiplexed network-on-chip(NoC) is a promising approach to provide a guaranteed service in NoC. Most recently, the trellis-search algorithm demonstrated using an application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP). The processor achieved a considerable performance improvement for searching optimum paths. However, there is still a scalability issue. As network size increases, the path search time is rapidly increased. The purpose of this work is to introduce a relative search algorithm and to investigate its effect on NoC performance. Our proposed algorithm optimizes path search region and position according to the actual source-destination position on the network grid. Consequently, even though the network size is increased, the path search time of our proposed algorithm is gradually raised. The simulation results using 16x16 2D-mesh showed up to 10 thousand times and 3.5 times decreases in average execution cycles against 32bits RISC and ASIP, respectively.