Rediscovering Logarithmic Diameter Topologies for Low Latency Network-on-Chip-based applications

Low-latency Network-on-Chip (NoC) applications have tight constraints on the clock budget to perform communication among nodes. This is a critical aspect in NoC-based designs where the number of clock cycles spent for communication depends mainly on the topology and on the routing algorithm. This work deals with logarithmic diameter topologies, that were proposed for computer networks, and shows that an optimal shortest-path routing algorithm can be efficiently implemented on this kind of topologies by means of a very simple circuit. The proposed circuit is then exploited to reduce the area and the power consumption of a recently proposed NoC-based design. Experimental results show that the proposed circuit allows for a reduction of about 14% and 10% for area and power consumption respectively, with respect to a shortest-path routing-table-based design.