Abstract:

Advanced integration technologies enable the construction of NetworkonChip (NoC) from two dimensions to three dimensions. Studies have shown that 3D NoCs can improve the average communication performance because of the possibility of using the additional dimension to shorten the communication distance. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis on the worstcase communication performance in the regular kary2mesh networks and their 3D forms. We show that, though 3D networks achieve better average latency, this may not be the case for the worstcase performance mainly due to the constraints on vertical channels. Our analysis is based on network calculus, which allows to calculate the theoretical delay bounds for constrained flows traversing network elements.

Key words: 3D NoC;network calculus;delay bound;performance analysis