Planar adaptive network-on-chip supporting deadlock-free and efficient tree-based multicast routing method

Networks-on-chip (NoC) router microarchitectures in mesh standard architectures and a mesh planar architecture with a dual-vertical-line are presented in this paper. Both NoC microarchitectures support a deadlock-free static and efficient adaptive tree-based multicast routing method. Multicast packets are routed and scheduled in the NoC by using a flexible multiplexing technique with wormhole switching. The flexibility of the proposed multicast routing method is based on a locally organized packet identity (ID-tag) attached to every flit. This concept allows different packets to be interleaved at flit-level in a single buffer pool on the same link. Furthermore, a pheromone tracking strategy is proposed in this paper in order to reduce communication energy in the adaptive tree-based multicast routing method. The strategy is used to perform efficient spanning trees for the adaptive tree-based multicast routing that are made at runtime during application execution time. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.