An Efficient Algorithm for 3D NoC Architecture Optimization

Abstract

With the progress of 3D IC integration technologies, the application of 3D Networks-on-chip (NoCs) has been proposed as a scalable and efficient solution to the global communication in the interconnect designs. In this work, we propose a new procedure for designing application specific irregular 3D NoC architectures. This procedure does not only satisfy the variability of the highly customized SoC designs, but also achieve significant performance improvement. The objective is to improve both communication latency and power consumption under several 3D constraints. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) based efficient algorithm is applied to optimize both the topology and floorplan. Numerical experiments are implemented on standard benchmarks by comparing the method application in 3D architectures with the 2D designs and then comparing the architecture obtained by our proposed algorithm with both classical topologies and custom based topologies. The experimental results show that the architectures by our design algorithm can achieve more performance improvement than other algorithms and the proposed algorithm also proves to be a time efficient method for exploration in the large solution space.