Bridging the Frequency Gap in Heterogeneous 3D SoCs through Technology-Specific NoC Router Architectures

Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC), pp. 197–203

Abstract

In heterogeneous 3D System-on-Chips (SoCs), NoCs with uniform properties suffer one major limitation; the clock frequency of routers varies due to different manufacturing technologies. For example, digital nodes allow for a higher clock frequency of routers than mixed-signal nodes. This large frequency gap is commonly tackled by complex and expensive pseudo-mesochronous or asynchronous router architectures. Here, a more efficient approach is chosen to bridge the frequency gap. We propose to use a heterogeneous network architecture. We show that reducing the number of VCs allows to bridge a frequency gap of up to 2x. We achieve a system-level latency improvement of up to 47% for uniform random traffic and up to 59% for PARSEC benchmarks, a maximum throughput increase of 50%, up to 68% reduced area and 38% reduced power in an exemplary setting combining 15-nm digital and 30-nm mixed-signal nodes and comparing against a homogeneous synchronous network architecture. Versus asynchronous and pseudo-mesochronous router architectures, the proposed optimization consistently performs better in area, in power and the average flit latency improvement can be larger than 51%.

Authors 8

1. Jan Moritz Joseph Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University, Germany

2. Lennart Bamberg
   Affiliation as printed

   GrAI Matter Labs, Eindhoven

3. Geonhwa Jeong

   Georgia Institute of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

4. Ruei-Ting Chien

   Georgia Institute of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

5. Rainer Leupers Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University, Germany

6. Alberto Garía-Ortiz

   University of Bremen

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Bremen, Germany

7. Tushar Krishna

   Georgia Institute of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

8. Thilo Pionteck

   Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg

   Affiliation as printed

   Otto-von-Guericke Universität, Magdeburg, Germany