Global Transaction Ordering in Network-on-Chips for Post-Silicon Validation

Amir Masoud Gharehbaghi and Masahiro Fujita
University of Tokyo


Abstract

This paper presents a method to extract global order of transactions from local partial orders in NoC tiles. The ordering method is based on our set of “happened before” rules, assuming transactions do not have a timestamp. The assumption is based on the fact that implementation and usage of a global time as timestamp in such systems may not be practical or efficient. We have improved the extracted global order by considering the information from the neighboring tiles. We have studied the effect of our method on global ordering of transactions in mesh and torus topologies with different sizes from 5*5 to 9*9. We have shown that by considering neighboring information, global ordering improves 1.9 to 5.1 times depending on topology and network size.