ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the architectural design of wormhole and virtual channel routers for Network-on-chip (NoC). It suggests that the salient contributions are as follows: to support globally asynchronous locally synchronous style of communication, a gray counter-based dual-clock first-in first-out (FIFO) has been designed and used in NoC router, design of wormhole router for mesh-of-tree topology has been described in detail. The chapter describes the switching technique and packet format of 4 × 4 mesh-of-tree-based NoC. It discusses the design of dual-clock FIFO and globally asynchronous locally synchronous style of communication, respectively and also describes adaptive router architecture. The major challenge of dual-clock asynchronous FIFO is that the FULL and EMPTY signals of the FIFO are dependent on both the clocks. Asynchronous comparator module compares the write and read pointers and generates the asynchronous full and empty signals. This module contains only combinational comparison logic.
