Increasing the number of cores on a chip is one way to solve the bottleneck of exponential growth but an excessive number of cores can lead to problems such as communication blockage and overheating of the chip. Currently, networks-on-chip (NoC) can offer an effective solution to the problem of the communication bottleneck within the chip. With current advancements in IC manufacturing technology, chips can now be 3D-stacked in order to increase chip throughput as well as reduce power consumption while reducing the area of the chip. Automating the mapping of applications into 3D NoC topologies is an important new direction for research in the field of 3D NoC. In this paper, a 3D NoC partitioning algorithm is proposed, which can delineate the 3D NoC region to be mapped. Additionally, a double particle swarm optimization (DPSO) based heuristic algorithm is proposed, which can integrate the characteristics of neighborhood search and genetic algorithms, and thus solve the problem of a particle swarm algorithm falling into local optimal solutions. It is experimentally demonstrated that this DPSO-based hybrid optimization algorithm has a higher throughput rate and lower energy loss than the traditional heuristic algorithm.
Keywords: 3D NoC; gene cross-mutation; high performance computing; neighborhood search; particle swarm optimization.