UBMR:A low-power and low-area multicastrouter with unified buffers forNetwork-on-Chips

Abstract Network-on-Chip(NoC) has become a promising communicationparadigm for Multi-Processors System-on-Chip (MPSoC) due to its highcommunication efficiency, good scalability, and high reliability. In prac-tice, in addition to one-to-one unicast traffic in NoC, there is also a largeamount of one-to-many multicast traffic. The traditional unicast-basedmechanism for handling multicast traffic leads to a large number of repet-itive and redundant packets in the network, which rapidly consumes thenetwork bandwidth and dramatically reduces the performance of the net-work. Meanwhile, with the continuous scaling of the chip fabrication pro-cess, the power consumption increases dramatically, which also makes theNoC design face great challenges. To mitigate these problem, we proposea tree-based multicast routing algorithm to ensure that multicast pack-ets and their copies reach the destination router all through the shortestpath. For better compatibility with our proposed routing algorithm, wealso propose a unified buffer multicast router architecture, which not onlysimplifies the multicast routing algorithm, but also reduces the powerconsumption and the area overhead of the router. Detailed simulationresults show that the number of packets transmitted in the networkis reduced by 28%, and the area and power consumption are reducedby 40.6% and 38.6%, respectively, compared to conventional routers.