A 256-Radix Crossbar Switch Using Mux-Matrix-Mux Folded-Clos Topology

This paper describes a high-radix crossbar switch design with low latency and power dissipation for Network-on-Chip (NoC) applications. The reduction in latency and power is achieved by employing a folded-clos topology, implementing the switch organized as three stages of low-radix switches connected in cascade. In addition, to facilitate the uniform placement of wires among the sub-switch stages, this paper proposes a Mux-Matrix-Mux structure, which implements the first and third switch stages as multiplexer-based crossbars and the second stage as a matrix-type crossbar. The proposed 256-radix, 8-bit crossbar switch designed in a 65nm CMOS has the simulated power dissipation of 1.92-W and worst-case propagation delay of 0.991-ns while operating at 1.2-V supply and 500-MHz frequency. Compared with the state-of-the-art designs in literature, the proposed crossbar switch achieves the best energy-delay-area efficiency of $0.73-fJ/cycle{\cdot}ns{\cdot}{\lambda}^2$.