[Back]

S. Naqvi, R. Najvirt, A. Steininger:
"A Multi-Credit Flow Control Scheme for Asynchronous NoCs";
Talk: 16th IEEE Symposium on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems, Karoly Vary, Czech Republic; 2013-04-08 - 2013-04-10; in: "Proc. 16th IEEE Symposium on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems", (2013), 6 pages.

Credit schemes are used to establish flow control in
NoCs without blocking the communication channel. In traditional
implementations one credit is transmitted per data flit, so the
credit channel conveys as many messages as the data channel.
Our proposed multi-credit scheme transmits credits in bundles
of M, yielding one credit transmission per M flits. This saves
transitions on the credit channel and promises a slower, more
energy efficient implementation. We investigate requirements,
options and benefits of this approach; first in theory, and
then in a concrete application example, in which we propose a
specifically beneficial implementation. Our study confirms that,
with a negligible increase in area, our scheme can reduce dynamic
energy as well as bandwidth requirements for the credit channel.