Star-Type Architecture with Low Transmission Latency for a 2D Mesh NOC

The 2D mesh network on chip (NOC) is a popular NOC topology because of network scalability and the use of a simple routing algorithm. However, the long distance traffic may suffer from high transmission latency. In this paper, we propose an improved design called the star-type architecture in which the long distance traffic is allowed to traverse an additional second-level mesh. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed design can reduce the number of hops traversed for long distance traffic. A 12 x 12 star-type NOC shows performance improvements of 17.2% and 10.3% in comparison with the normal 2D mesh and level-2 mesh architectures, respectively.