EquiNox: Equivalent NoC Injection Routers for Silicon Interposer-Based Throughput Processors

Throughput-oriented many-core processors demand highly efficient network-on-chip (NoC) architecture for data transferring. Recent advent of silicon interposer, stacked memory and 2.5D integration have further increased data transfer rate. This greatly intensifies traffic bottleneck in the NoC but, at the same time, also brings a significant new opportunity in utilizing wiring resources in the interposer. In this paper, we propose a novel concept called Equivalent Injection Routers (EIRs) which, together with interposer links, transform the few-to-many traffic pattern to many-to-many pattern, thus fundamentally solving the bottleneck problem. We have developed EquiNox as a design example. We utilize N-Queen and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods to help select EIRs by considering comprehensively from topological, architectural and physical aspects. Evaluation results show that, compared with prior work, the proposed EquiNox is able to reduce execution time by 23.5%, energy consumption by 18.9%, and EDP by 32.8%, under similar hardware cost.