Overview of Network-on-Chip
Written by Jun Ho Bahn
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Introduction
To meet the growing computation-intensive applications and the needs of low-power, high-performance systems, the number of computing resources in single-chip has enormously increased, because current VLSI technology can support such an extensive integration of transistors. By adding many computing resources such as CPU, DSP, specific IPs, etc to build a system in System-on-Chip, its interconnection between each other becomes another challenging issue. In most System-on-Chip applications, a shared bus interconnection which needs an arbitration logic to serialize several bus access requests, is adopted to communicate with each integrated processing unit because of its low-cost and simple control characteristics. However, such shared bus interconnection has some limitation in its scalability because only one master at a time can utilize the bus which means all the bus accesses should be serialized by the arbitrator. Therefore, in such an environment where the number of bus requesters is large and their required bandwidth for interconnection is more than the current bus, some other interconnection methods should be considered.
Such scalable bandwidth requirement can be satisfied
by using on-chip packet-switched micro-network of interconnects, generally
known as Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture. The basic idea came from
traditional large-scale multi-processors and distributed computing networks.
The scalable and modular nature of NoCs and their support for efficient on-chip
communication lead to NoC-based system implementations. Even though the current
network technologies are well developed and their supporting features are
excellent, their complicated configurations and implementation complexity make
it hard to be adopted as an on-chip interconnection methodology. In order to
meet typical SoCs or multi-core processing environment, basic module of network
interconnection like switching logic, routing algorithm and its packet
definition should be light-weighted to result in easily implemental solutions.
Background
As the semiconductor processing technology is advanced to sub-nano one, there are several side effects awaited. One of critical issues is a wiring delay. While the speed of basic elements such as gate delay becomes much faster, the wiring delay is growing exponentially as shown in Figure 1 because of the increased capacitance caused by narrow channel width and increased crosstalk. Therefore, if this trend be sustained, the wiring is one of the critical issues to be concerned.
Figure 1. Technical Roadmap in Semiconductor Industry [1]
In communication between several cores in System-on-Chip (SoC) environment, some prevailing mechanisms for this purpose are several bus-based architectures and point-to-point communication methodologies. For simplicity and ease of use, the bus-based architectures are the most common. However, in bus-based architecture, it has fundamentally some limitation in bandwidth, i.e. while the number of components attached to the bus is increased, a physical capacitance on the bus wires grows and as a result its wiring delay grows even further. To overcome the fundamental limitation of scalability in bus-based architectures, some advanced bus architectures such as ARM™ AMBA [2], OpenCore’s WISHBONE System-on-Chip (SoC) interconnection [3], and IBM CoreConnect™ [4], are adopted. The Figure 2 illustrates basic structure of ARM™ AMBA. As shown in Figure 2, most of advanced bus architectures adopt a hierarchical structure to obtain scalable communication throughput and partition communication domains into several group of communication layers depending on bandwidth requirement such as high-performance, low-performance and so on.
Figure 2. Typical ARM™ AMBA-bused System
Another approach to exceed
such a limitation of communication and overcome such an enormous wiring delay
in future technology is to adopt network-like interconnections which is called
Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture. Basic concept of such kind of
interconnections is from the modern computer network evolution as mentioned
before. By applying network-like communication which inserts some routers
in-between each communication object, the required wiring can be shortened.
Therefore, the switch-based interconnection mechanism provides a lot of
scalability and freedom from the limitation of complex wiring. Replacement of
SoC busses by NoCs will follow the same path of data communications when the
economics prove that the NoC either reduces SoC manufacturing cost, SoC time to
market, SoC time to volume, and SoC design risk or increases SoC performance.
According to [5], the NoC approach has a clear advantage over
traditional busses and most notably system throughput. And hierarchies of
crossbars or multilayered busses have characteristics somewhere in between
traditional busses and NoC, however they still fall far short of the NoC with
respect to performance and complexity.
The success of the NoC design
depends on the research of the interfaces between processing elements of NoC
and interconnection fabric. The interconnection of a SoC established procedures
has some weak points in those respects of slow bus response time, energy
limitation, scalability problem and bandwidth limitation. Bus interconnection
composed of a large number of components in a network interface can cause slow
interface time though the influence of sharing the bus. In addition the
interconnection has a defect that power consumption is high on the score of
connecting all objects in the communication. Moreover it is impossible to
increase the number of connection of the elements infinitely by reason of the
limitation of bandwidth in a bus. As a consequence, the performance of the NoC
design relies greatly on the interconnection paradigm.
Though the network technology
in computer network is already well developed, it is almost impossible to apply
to a chip-level intercommunication environment without any modification or
reduction. For that reason, many researchers are trying to develop appropriate network
architectures for on-chip communication. To be eligible for NoC architecture,
the basic functionality should be simple and light-weighted because the
implemented component of NoC architecture should be small enough to be a basic
component constructing a SoC. Even though the basic functionality should be
simple, it also satisfies the basic requirement in general communication. On
the other hand, to apply the prevailing mobile environment, it should be
low-powered. In order to be low powered one has to consider many parameters
such as clock rate, operating voltage, and power management scheme.
Related works
In designing NoC systems, there are several issues to
be concerned with, such as topologies, routing algorithms, performance,
latency, complexity and so on. Among these factors, nothing can be independent
in deciding an NoC architecture. There are several different kinds of topologies.
Guerrier and Greiner [6] have proposed a generic interconnect template called
SPIN, where a fat-tree architecture is used to interconnect IP blocks. In this
fat-tree, every node has four children and the parent is replicated four times
at any level of the tree. Kumar et al. [7] has proposed a mesh-based interconnect architecture
called CLICHÉ (Chip-Level Integration of Communicating Heterogeneous Elements).
This architecture consists of an m x n mesh of switches interconnecting
computational resources (IPs) placed along with the switches. Dally and Towles [8] have proposed a 2D torus as an NoC architecture. The
Torus architecture is basically the same as a regular mesh. The only difference
is that the switches at the edges are connected to the switches at the opposite
edge through wrap-around channels. Karim et al. [9] have proposed the OCTAGON MP-SoC architecture with a basic octagon
unit consisting of eight nodes and 12 bi-diretional links. Each node is
associated with a processing element and a switch. Communication between any
pair of nodes takes at most two hops within the basic octagonal unit. Pande et
al. [10] have proposed an interconnect template following a
Butterfly Fat-Tree (BFT) architecture where the IPs are placed at the leaves
and switches placed at the vertices. As a feasible topology in NoC systems, the
mesh is getting popular for its modularity; it can be easily expandable by
adding new nodes and links without any modification of the existing node
structure. As the mesh nodes can be used as basic components in on-chip
communication, they are potentially important components to accomplish a
scalable communication model in NoC environment [11]. Another reason behind this popularity is the notion
of being partitioned into smaller meshes, which is a desirable feature for
parallel applications [12].
Another issue in NoC
environment is the routing algorithm. In terms of delivering mechanism, i.e.
switching technique, there are different types of switching techniques such as
circuit switching, packet switching, and wormhole switching [13]. Switching techniques determine when and how internal
switches connect their inputs to outputs and the time at which message
components may be transferred along these paths. In circuit switching, a
physical path from source to destination is reserved prior to the transmission
of the data throughout initialization processes including setup and
acknowledgement. The reserved path is held until all the data has been
delivered. The advantage of this approach is the reserved network bandwidth for
the entire duration of the delivered data. However, with respect to the
resource utilization, it ties valuable resources during the transmission of
data and the initialization processes cause unnecessary delays. In packet
switching, data is divided into fixed-length packets and, instead of
establishing a path before sending data in circuit switching, whenever the
source has a packet to be sent, it transmits the data. In order to store entire
packets in a switch, it requires large-sized buffers. Therefore, the need for
storing entire packets in a switch makes the buffer requirement high, resulting
in infeasible solution for an SoC environment. In wormhole switching, the
packets are further divided into fixed length flow control units or flits,
resulting in smaller buffer space requirement in the switches. One drawback of
this simple wormhole switching is inability of interleaving or multiplexing
distinct messages over a physical channel. However, by applying virtual
channels, such channel utilization can be increased. Among several switching
techniques, wormhole routing has increasingly been advocated as a method of
reducing message routing latency.
In terms of the way of
choosing a path among the set of possible paths from source to destination, the
routing algorithms are classified as deterministic/oblivious and adaptive ones [14]. The oblivious/deterministic routing algorithms choose a route without
considering any information about the network’s present condition, resulting in
relatively simple design complexity. Adaptive routing algorithms use the state
of the network like the status of a node or link, the status of buffers for
network resources, or history of channel load information. Adaptive routing
algorithms are refined as minimal or fully adaptive routing ones depending on
the degree of adaptivity. Even though the adaptive routing algorithms utilize
the flexibility in routing paths, the design complexity should be increased. DOR
(dimension-ordered routing) [15], ROMM [16], and O1TURN [17] are examples of deterministic or oblivious routing
algorithms. And some researchers have developed better performance routing
algorithms using adaptive routing algorithms [18][19][20][21][22][23].
On the other hand, the
adoption of virtual channel (abbreviated to VC) has been prevailing because of
its versatility. By adding virtual channels and proper utilization,
deadlock-freedom can be easily accomplished. Network throughput can be increased
by dividing the buffer storage associated with each network channel into
several virtual channels [19], resulting in increase of channel utilization. By
proper control of virtual channels, network flow control can be easily
implemented [24]. Also to increase the fault tolerance in network, the
concept of virtual channel has been utilized [25][26]. However, in order to maximize its utilization, how
to allocate virtual channels is a critical issue in designing routing
algorithms [27][28].
The network interconnects
implement interfaces such as AXI, OCP and DTL to connect IP modules within the
NoC. AMBA Extended Interface (AXI) [29] is the next generation, high performance on-chip
interface technology developed by ARM to support ARM11 family-class processors.
The configurable AXI interconnection components provide data-efficient,
highly-optimized link from the processor and data bursting in ARM core-based
NoC systems. Furthermore the AXI configurable Interconnect supports a
multi-layer topology that guarantees the necessary bandwidth and low latency
for all connected IPs and it provides related ARM technologies, such as IEM for
voltage and frequency scaling. The Open Core Protocol (OCP) [30] is a plug and play interface for a core having both
master and slave interfaces. The OCP signals of the functional IP blocks are
packetized by a second interface. All signals are synchronous, simplifying core
implementation, integration and timing analysis. It defines a point-to-point
interface between two communicating entities and each component acts as the
master and the slave. The OCP integrates all inter-core communications,
including dataflow and sideband control signals. The Device Transaction Level
(DTL) [31] is one of standard for interconnection researched by
Philips Semiconductors to interface IPs existing a SoC. The DTL allows easy
extension to other future interconnection standard.
Reference
[1]
ITRS, International Technology Roadmap for
Semiconductors 2004 Update, 2004.
[2]
AMBA™
Specification Rev. 2.0, http://www.arm.com, 1999.
[4]
The CoreConnect Bus Architecture
http://www-03.ibm.com/chips/products/coreconnect/, 1999.
[5]
A Comparison of
Network-on-Chip and Busses,
http://www.arteris.com/noc_whitepaper.pdf, 2005.
[6]
P. Guerrier and
A. Greiner, “A Generic Architecture for On-Chip Packet-Switched
Interconnections,” Proc. Design and Test
in
[14] Principles
and Practices of Interconnection Networks, W. J. Dally and B. Towles,
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers,
[25] R. V. Boppana and
[30] OCP International Partnership. Open Core Protocol
Specifi- cation. 2.0 Release Candidate, 2003.
[31] PHILIPSSEMICONDUCTORS. 2002. Device Transaction Level
(DTL) Protocol Specification, Version 2.2.