According to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, improving characteristics of metal wires will no longer satisfy performance requirements, and new interconnect paradigms are needed. Radio frequency interconnect (RF-I) enjoys better CMOS compatibility compared with other alternatives, and is exploited as express shortcuts overlaid traditional network-on-chip (NoC) topologies. However, the efficient utilization of on-chip communication bandwidth provided by RF interconnects still remains an open problem. To make effective use of scarce on-chip RF-I for different traffic patterns, system model of NoC with shared RF-I (SRFNoC) is constructed first time in this paper, along with detailed design methodology. A light-weighted arbitration mechanism is utilized for sharing resource allocation, and a new mapping algorithm communication weight and simulated annealing is proposed for topology distribution. Both static and dynamic routings for SRFNoC are also discussed in detail. The results of experiment showed that, compared with the NoC with long-range wired links and representative network-on-chip with exclusive allocated radio frequency interconnect, the proposed network can get better communication efficiency with less resource overhead.
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