Expansible Network-on-Chip Architecture

Interconnection has a great importance to provide a high bandwidth communication among parallel systems. On multi-core context, Network-on-Chip is the default intra-chip interconnection choice, providing low contention and high bandwidth between the processing elements. However, the communication outside the chip commonly uses high performance links which have the entire communication protocol stack overhead. This paper introduces the Expansible NoC concept and architecture, which is formed by wired and wireless NoC components in order to provide a low overhead interconnection for intra-chip and inter-chip communication. ENoC couples both networks with the same simplified protocol, enabling the transmission of parallel messages directly in the NoC level. The ability of identifying new communicant on-the-fly increases its flexibility, expanding the system boundaries every time a new system is connected. The ENoC inter-chip wireless link reaches short distances working at 60 GHz with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing with Quadrature Amplitude Modulation, enabling high bandwidth communication for systems inside a single cluster rack. Experimental evaluations were performed using the Noxim simulator executing computational fluid dynamics benchmark applications. Results show that the proposed architecture improves up to 38% the performance when compared to the newest related work.