RR-SFVP: Design of arbitration unit based on Round Robin method with Strong Fairness and Variable Priority for NoC Router

Abstract

Network on chip (NoC) is one of the communicative structures for multiple cores that has scalability. In designing the NoC micro-router architecture, the arbitration unit is very important due to its significant impact on performance, chip occupation level and NoC power consumption. In this paper, a router arbitration architecture is proposed with a combination of variable priority arbitration and Round Robin. In this architecture, arbitration examines the requests of other channels based on the Round Robin index after requesting the flit to exit the virtual channel in addition to checking the availability of the relevant virtual channel.The simulation results show that the architecture of the RR-SFVP arbitration unit compared to the standard RR method, is 13.7% smaller in area and has 5.7% less power consumption and 53.7% less critical path delay.