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Abstract As a high performance on-chip communication method, decoding method, a key demux-accumulation-compare unit is
the code division multiple access (CDMA) technique has recently been used to retrieve the source data from mixed data chips (in this
applied to networks on chip (NoCs). We propose a new standard-basis-
brief, each bit of a spreading code is called a chip, and thus
based encoding/decoding method to leverage the performance and cost
of CDMA NoCs in area, power assumption, and network throughput. the encoded data is called data chips). This unit is, however,
In the transmitter module, source data from different senders are area-consuming.
separately encoded with an orthogonal code of a standard basis and 2) Low Code Utilization: In an S-chip Walsh code set [6], S must
these coded data are mixed together by an XOR operation. Then, the be equal to 2N , where N is a natural number, and at most
sums of data can be transmitted to their destinations through the on-
chip communication infrastructure. In the receiver module, a sequence of S 1 sequences can be used to encode the original data. This
chips is retrieved by taking an AND operation between the sums of data results in a waste of sequences in the code set. For example,
and the corresponding orthogonal code. After a simple accumulation a 16-node network needs a 32-chip Walsh code set, because
of these chips, original data can be reconstructed. We implement our a 16-chip Walsh code set can only provide 15 sequences for
encoding/decoding method and apply it to a CDMA NoC with a star
topology. Compared with the state-of-the-art Walsh-code-based (WB)
data encoding and it thus cannot satisfy the requirement of
encoding/decoding technique, our method achieves up to 67.46% power 16 sequences, one for each node.
saving and 81.24% area saving together with decrease of 30%50% To address the aforementioned weaknesses, we propose a
encoding/decoding latency. Moreover, the CDMA NoC with different new standard-basis-Based (SB) encoding/decoding method, which
sizes applying our encoding/decoding method gains power saving, area
saving, and maximal throughput improvement up to 20.25%, 22.91%, outperforms the WB encoding/decoding method. The SB encoding/
and 103.26%, respectively, than the WB CDMA NoC. decoding method can be applied to any CDMA NoCs to improve
their performance.
Index Terms Code division multiple access (CDMA), The rest of this brief is organized as follows. In Section II, we dis-
integrated circuit (IC), network on chip (NoC). cuss related work. In Section III, we detail the SB encoding/decoding
method and formally prove its correctness. The simulation results and
I. I NTRODUCTION comparisons between the SB method and the WB method are pre-
sented in Section IV. Finally, we draw the conclusions in Section V.
With the rapid growth of the computational complexity, more and
more processing elements (PEs) are integrated onto a single chip, II. R ELATED W ORK
and network on chip (NoC) has been proposed to address the scal- The CDMA technique has recently attracted research attentions
ability, throughput, and reliability issues of on-chip communication.
in the NoC community. To show the advantages of CDMA NoC,
However, conventional packet-switched NoCs suffer from nondeter-
Kim et al. [4] used Walsh codes to distinguish different senders and
ministic transmission latency and limited opportunities for parallel
develop a hierarchical star-mesh topology to handle a large number
data transfer, since multiple flows cannot get through a link at the of communication processors. The simulation results show that the
same time [1]. To resolve these problems, the CDMA technique [2]
CDMA NoC has good performance in latency and throughput. In [7],
as an effective method for implementing high performance on-chip
a specific application is scheduled onto a CDMA-based NoC and a
communication [3] was applied to NoCs [4], [5].
conventional crossbar-based packet-switched NoC. The experimental
The previously proposed CDMA NoCs are based on a digital
results show that the CDMA NoC achieves lower packet transfer
encoding and decoding method requiring that the spreading codes
latency and less area overhead.
have both the orthogonal and balance properties. To this end, the
To further improve the CDMA NoC performance, a globally
Walsh code is typically used. However, the Walsh-code-based (WB) asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) CDMA NoC is modeled
encoding and decoding method has inherent shortcomings, which are
and simulated in [8]. By applying the GALS strategy to CDMA
given as follows.
NoC, the CDMA NoC can be used for asynchronous chips. In [9],
1) Design Complexity: In the encoding method, an arithmetic the multicasting function is realized in CDMA NoC to address the
addition logic unit, whose logic overhead increases with the hotspot problem at the center of NoC with mesh topology. The
number of senders, is used to mix coded data together. In the results exhibit that traffic congestion at the center of NoC is reduced.
Manuscript received March 31, 2015; revised July 1, 2015; accepted
Since code utilization rate affects the CDMA NoC performance,
August 6, 2015. This work was supported in part by the Sichuan Province two methods on code word assignment are separately proposed
Science and Technology Support Program under Grant 2014SZ0093, in part in [10] and [11]. In [10], the length of code word is adjusted
by the China Post-Doctoral Science Foundation under Grant 2014M562303, depending on the number of nodes that have packets to send at
and in part by the National Natural Science Funds under Grant 61201005. the same time. In [11], a scheduling method is proposed to make a
J. Wang is with the University of Electronic Science and Technology of
China, Chengdu 610051, China, and also with the KTH Royal compromise on the utilization rate of code words. Simulation results
Institute of Technology, Stockholm 114 28, Sweden (e-mail: show that these methods improve the utilization efficiency of the
wangjian3630@uestc.edu.cn). orthogonal codes.
Z. Lu is with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm 114 28, Besides the traditional wired NoC, the CDMA technique has also
Sweden (e-mail: zhonghai@kth.se).
Y. Li is with the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China,
been applied to photonic NoC [12] and wireless NoC [13]. The results
Chengdu 610051, China (e-mail: ybli@uestc.edu.cn). show that their performance can be significantly improved with lower
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVLSI.2015.2471077 energy and area compared with the crossbar-based NoC.
1063-8210 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
WANG et al.: CDMA ENCODING/DECODING FOR ON-CHIP COMMUNICATION 1608
TABLE II
D IFFERENCES B ETWEEN WB AND SB M ETHOD
TABLE III
C OMPARISON OF E NCODER /D ECODER A REA AND P OWER
Fig. 6. CDMA NoC scaling. (a) Directly scaling. (b) Cluster-based scaling.
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