Topology synthesis of cascaded crossbar switches

Performance requirements of on-chip network increase as system-on-chips (SoCs) are becoming more and more complex. For high-performance applications, crossbar switch-based networks are replacing the traditional shared buses as the backbone networks in SoCs. In this paper, we tackle the topology design of on-chip networks with crossbar switches in a cascaded fashion. We also resolve the unacceptable complexity of our previous method based on mixed integer linear programming by a heuristic method. Experimental results show that the proposed method overcomes the frequency limitation of the single crossbar-based design, particularly when the wire delay effect is considered. The proposed heuristic method also achieves more area reduction (up to 69.5%) over the existing methods, and finds as good solutions as the exact method while the synthesis time is saved by orders of magnitude.