On the Design of Reliable Hybrid Wired-Wireless Network-on-Chip Architectures

© 2015 IEEE.With the ever increase in transistor density over technology scaling, energy and performance aware hybrid wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC) has emerged as an alternative solution to the slow conventional wireline NoC design for future System-on-Chip (SoC). However, combining wireless and wireline channels drastically reduces the total reliability of the communication fabric. Besides being lossy, existing feasible wireless solution for WiNoCs, which is in the form of millimeter wave (mm-Wave), relies on free space signal radiation which has high power dissipation with high degradation rate in the signal strength per transmission distance. Alternatively, low power wireless communication fabric in the form of surface wave has been proposed for on-chip communication. With the right design considerations, the reliability and performance benefits of the surface wave channel could be extended. In this paper, we propose a surface wave communication fabric for emerging WiNoCs that is able to match the channel reliability of traditional wireline NoCs. Here, a carefully designed transducer and commercially available thin metal conductor coated with a low cost dielectric material are employed to general surface wave signal to improve the wireless signal transmission gain. Our experimental results demonstrate that, the proposed communication fabric can achieve a 5dB operational bandwidth of about 60GHz around the center frequency (60GHz). By improving the transmission reliability of wireless layer, the proposed communication fabric can improve maximum sustainable load of NoCs by an average of 20.9% and 133.3% compared to existing WiNoCs and wireline NoCs, respectively.