A High-Performance Network Interface Architecture for NoCs Using Reorder Buffer Sharing

Masoumeh Ebrahimi, Masoud Daneshtalab, Pasi Liljeberg, Juha Plosila, Hannu Tenhunen

Abstract: Increasing memory parallelism in MPSoCs to provide higher memory bandwidth is achieved by accessing multiple memories simultaneously. Inasmuch as the response transactions of concurrent memory accesses must be in-order, a reordering mechanism is required. To our knowledge the resource utilization of conventional reordering mechanisms is low. In this paper, we present a novel network interface architecture for on-chip networks to increase the resource utilization and to improve overall performance. Also, based on the proposed architecture, a hybrid network interface is presented to integrate both memory and processor in a tile. The proposed architecture exploits AXI transaction based protocol to be compatible with existing IP cores. Experimental results with synthetic test cases demonstrate that the proposed architecture outperforms the conventional architecture in terms of latency. Also, the cost of the presented architecture is evaluated with UMC 0.09 ¿ m technology.