This book focuses on the microarchitecture of network-on-chip routers from a designer's perspective, providing ready-to-use solutions for simple and more sophisticated design cases. All aspects of the design of a network-on-chip router, including flow control, buffering architectures, arbitration and allocation, as well as pipelined organizations, are presented in detail. The authors provide numerous detailed examples and practical abstract models, when necessary. Router micro-architectural options are presented in a step-by-step manner, beginning from basic design principles. Even highly sophisticated design alternatives are categorized and broken down to simpler pieces that can be understood easily and analyzed. This book is an invaluable reference for system, architecture, circuit, and EDA researchers and developers, who are interested in understanding the overall picture of network-on-chip routers' microarchitecture, the associated design challenges, and the available solutions.

Introduction to network-on-chip design.- Link-level flow control and buffering.- Baseline switching modules and routers.- Arbitration logic.- Pipelined wormhole routers.- Virtual-channel flow control and buffering.- Baseline virtual-channel based switching modules and routers.- High-speed allocators for VC-based routers.- Pipelined virtual-channel-based routers.