An optimised 3D topology for on-chip communications.

Increasing system complexity, energy and device reliability, requirement of modular approach, structured layout, effective spatial reuse of resources, scalability and re-programmability have made network-on-chip (NoC) an obvious interconnection design alternative to the ubiquitous bus based on chip communication architecture in system-on-chip. Designing of a topology and its routing scheme plays a vital role in determining performance of any NoC architecture. In recent years, 3D stacked NoC architecture attracts added interest in NoC design as it offers improved performance and shorter global interconnect. In this paper, we have developed a partially, vertically interconnected 3D topology, namely 3D Recursive Network Topology (3D RNT) and prove that the topology has a Hamiltonian connectedness. We have developed deadlock-free routing algorithm for the 3D RNT topology. Also, we compare the performance of the 3D RNT with partially and fully connected 3D mesh topologies (3D PMT and 3D FMT) by conducting suitable experiments. The experiment results show that there is not much deviation in respect of the performance of the 3D RNT on comparing with 3D PMT and 3D FMT even though a number of vertical links are trimmed down to 75%, which is an encouraging outcome as far as design space is concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]