SMART: A Single-Cycle Reconfigurable NoC for SoC Applications
Chia-Hsin Owen Chen, Sunghyun Park, Tushar Krishna, Suvinay Subramanian, Anantha P. Chandrakasan, and Li-Shiuan Peh

As technology scales, SoCs are increasing in core counts, leading to the need for scalable NoCs to interconnect the multiple cores on the chip. Given aggressive SoC design targets, NoCs have to deliver low latency, high bandwidth, at low power and area overheads. In this paper, we propose Single-cycle Multihop Asynchronous Repeated Traversal (SMART) NoC, a NoC that reconfigures and tailors a generic mesh topology for SoC applications at runtime. The heart of our SMART NoC is a novel low-swing clockless repeated link circuit embedded within the router crossbars, that allows packets to potentially bypass all the way from source to destination core within a single clock cycle, without being latched at any intermediate router. Our clockless repeater link has been proven in silicon in 45nm SOI. Results show that at 2GHz, we can traverse 8 mm within a single cycle, i.e. 8 hops with 1 mm cores. We implement the SMART NoC to layout and show that SMART NoC gives 60% latency savings, and 2.2X power savings compared to a baseline mesh NoC.