Assessing fat-tree topologies for regular network-on-chip design under nanoscale technology constraints

Abstract

Most of past evaluations of fat-trees for on-chip interconnection networks rely on oversimplifying or even irrealistic architecture and traffic pattern assumptions, and very few layout analyses are available to relieve practical feasibility concerns in nanoscale technologies. This work aims at providing an in-depth assessment of physical synthesis efficiency of fat-trees and at extrapolating silicon-aware performance figures to back-annotate in the system-level performance analysis. A 2D mesh is used as a reference architecture for comparison, and a 65 nm technology is targeted by our study. Finally, in an attempt to mitigate the implementation cost of k-ary n-tree topologies, we also review an alternative unidirectional multi-stage interconnection network which is able to simplify the fat-tree architecture and to minimally impact performance.