Short Range Wireless Connectivity for Next Generation Architectures

This paper illustrates preliminary findings in our ongoing efforts on integrating Raw, a proposed scalable tiled processor architecture, with the robust wireless connectivity provided by BlueTooth (BT), one of the most popular short range wireless connectivity standards. Our work of integrating Raw and BT is primarily motivated by two ideas. First, we are interested to evaluate the possible performance benefits – as providing a wireless interconnection for global on-chip messaging could improve network utilization on the wired networks, and improve the scalability of applications with global communications. In an analytical study we have performed, we found that in a BT-enabled Raw, up to a factor of 5 performance improvement can be achieved for applications that require frequent global messages. Ultimately, we are also motivated by the wide range of applications that a BT-enabled tiled processor could enable, and the opportunity to easily cooperate with other devices that are BT compatible in a future ubiquitous world.