Design of on-chip crossbar network topology using chained edge partitioning

This paper proposes an efficient topology synthesis method for on-chip interconnection network based on crossbar switches. The efficiency of topology synthesis methods is often measured by two metrics - the quality of the synthesized topology and synthesis time. These two metrics are critically determined by the definition of the topology design space and the exploration method. Furthermore, an efficient representing method for the design space is required to tightly link the design space and the exploration method. Even though topology synthesis methods have actively been researched, most of the previous methods were not deep in thought for these factors. Unlike the previous methods, we propose a topology synthesis method with a careful consideration of these factors. Our method efficiently defines the design space by a technique called chained edge partitioning, in conjunction with a representing method for the points in the space, called enhanced restricted growth function. We also provide an exploration method which well incorporates with the aforementioned search space. To prove the effectiveness of our method, we compared our method with previous methods. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the compared methods by up to 49.8 and 104.6× in the quality of the synthesized topology and the synthesis time, respectively.