A low overhead load balancing router for network-on-chip

The design of a router in a network-on-chip(NoC) system has an important impact on some performance criteria.In this paper,we propose a low overhead load balancing router(LOLBR) for 2D mesh NoC to enhance routing performance criteria with low hardware overhead.The proposed LOLBR employs a balance toggle identifier to control the initial routing direction of X or Y for flit injection.The simplified demultiplexers and multiplexers are used to handle output ports allocation and contention,which provide a guarantee of deadlock avoidance.Simulation results show that the proposed LOLBR yields an improvement of routing performance over the reported routing schemes in average packet latency by 26.5%.The layout area and power consumption of the network compared with the reported routing schemes are 15.3%and 11.6%less respectively.