VLSI Design
Volume 2009 (2009), Article ID 941701, 15 pages
doi:10.1155/2009/941701
Research Article

Networks-On-Chip Based on Dynamic Wormhole Packet Identity Mapping Management

Faizal A. Samman,1,2 Thomas Hollstein,1 and Manfred Glesner1

1Institute of Microelectronic Systems, Darmstadt University of Technology, Karlstr 15, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany
2Department of Electrical Engineering, Hasanuddin University, Jl. Perintis Kemerdekaan km.10, Makassar 90245, Indonesia

Received 7 August 2008; Revised 1 December 2008; Accepted 7 January 2009

Academic Editor: Rached Tourki

Copyright © 2009 Faizal A. Samman et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper presents a network-on-chip (NoC) with flexible infrastructure based on dynamic wormhole packet identity management. The NoCs are developed based on a VHDL approach and support the design flexibility. The on-chip router uses a wormhole packet switching method with a synchronous parallel pipeline technique. Routing algorithms and dynamic wormhole local packet identity (ID-tag) mapping management are proposed to support a wire sharing methodology and an ID slot division multiplexing technique. At each communication link, flits belonging to the same message have the same local ID-tag, and the ID-tag is updated before the packet enters the next communication link by using an ID-tag mapping management unit. Therefore, flits from different messages can be interleaved, identified, and routed according to their allocated ID slots. Our NoC guarantees in order and lossless message delivery.