Design and implementation of an on-chip permutation network for multiprocessor system-on-chip

This paper presents the silicon-proven design of a novel on-chip network to support guaranteed traffic permutation in multiprocessor system-on-chip applications. The proposed network employs a pipelined circuit-switching approach combined with a dynamic path-setup scheme under a multistage network topology. The dynamic path-setup scheme enables runtime path arrangement for arbitrary traffic permutations. The circuit-switching approach offers a guarantee of permuted data and its compact overhead enables the benefit of stacking multiple networks. A 0.13-μm CMOS test-chip validates the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed design. Experimental results show that the proposed on-chip network achieves 1.9× to 8.2× reduction of silicon overhead compared to other design approaches.