Wireless Interconnects Enabled On-chip Multicast Communication

Abstract

The ability of multicasting is necessary and useful for Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs) to benefit and implement cache coherence protocols, parallel algorithms, etc. Whereas the design and implementation of high-efficient multicasting in traditional wired Network-on-Chip (NoC) is an arduous task. With the aid of wireless interconnects, not only the bandwidth and latency of NoC can be improved dramatically, but also the inherent broadcast properties of wireless signals can be adopted for multicasting. In this paper, we propose a mesh-like multicast enhancing mechanism based on wireless interconnects. Equipped with 9 wireless transceivers in a traditional 9 × 9 mesh NoC, this approach realizes a high efficiency, low latency group interconnection. Simulation results show the promising performance boosting of the wireless interconnection.