On-chip micronetworks, designed with a layered methodology, will meet the distinctive challenges of providing functionally correct, reliable operation of interacting system-on-chip components. A system on chip (SoC) can provide an integrated solution to challenging design problems in the telecommunications, multimedia, and consumer electronics domains. Much of the progress in these fields hinges on the designers' ability to conceive complex electronic engines under strong time-to-market pressure. Success will require using appropriate design and process technologies, as well as interconnecting existing components reliably in a plug-and-play fashion. Focusing on using probabilistic metrics such as average values or variance to quantify design objectives such as performance and power will lead to a major change in SoC design methodologies. Overall, these designs will be based on both deterministic and stochastic models. Creating complex SoCs requires a modular, component-based approach to both hardware and software design. Despite numerous challenges, the authors believe that developers will solve the problems of designing SoC networks. At the same time, they believe that a layered micronetwork design methodology will likely be the only path to mastering the complexity of future SoC designs.

Networks on chips: a new SoC paradigm

The scaling of microchip technologies has enabled large scale systems-on-chip (SoC). Network-on-chip (NoC) research addresses global communication in SoC, involving (i) a move from computation-centric to communication-centric design and (ii) the implementation of scalable communication structures. This survey presents a perspective on existing NoC research. We define the following abstractions: system, network adapter, network, and link to explain and structure the fundamental concepts. First, research relating to the actual network design is reviewed. Then system level design and modeling are discussed. We also evaluate performance analysis techniques. The research shows that NoC constitutes a unification of current trends of intrachip communication rather than an explicit new alternative.

/pdf/a-survey-of-research-and-practices-of-network-on-chip-2rc0mlsrfq.pdf

A survey of research and practices of Network-on-chip

Multiprocessor system-on-chip (MP-SoC) platforms are emerging as an important trend for SoC design. Power and wire design constraints are forcing the adoption of new design methodologies for system-on-chip (SoC), namely, those that incorporate modularity and explicit parallelism. To enable these MP-SoC platforms, researchers have recently pursued scaleable communication-centric interconnect fabrics, such as networks-on-chip (NoC), which possess many features that are particularly attractive for these. These communication-centric interconnect fabrics are characterized by different trade-offs with regard to latency, throughput, energy dissipation, and silicon area requirements. In this paper, we develop a consistent and meaningful evaluation methodology to compare the performance and characteristics of a variety of NoC architectures. We also explore design trade-offs that characterize the NoC approach and obtain comparative results for a number of common NoC topologies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in characterizing different NoC architectures with respect to their performance and design trade-offs. To further illustrate our evaluation methodology, we map a typical multiprocessing platform to different NoC interconnect architectures and show how the system performance is affected by these design trade-offs.

/pdf/performance-evaluation-and-design-trade-offs-for-network-on-2r2qk1xk70.pdf

Performance evaluation and design trade-offs for network-on-chip interconnect architectures

We address the design of complex monolithic systems, where processing cores generate and consume a varying and large amount of data, thus bringing the communication links to the edge of congestion. Typical applications are in the area of multi-media processing. We consider a mesh-based networks on chip (NoC) architecture, and we explore the assignment of cores to mesh cross-points so that the traffic on links satisfies bandwidth constraints. A single-path deterministic routing between the cores places high bandwidth demands on the links. The bandwidth requirements can be significantly reduced by splitting the traffic between the cores across multiple paths. In this paper, we present NMAP, a fast algorithm that maps the cores onto a mesh NoC architecture under bandwidth constraints, minimizing the average communication delay. The NMAP algorithm is presented for both single minimum-path routing and split-traffic routing. The algorithm is applied to a benchmark DSP design and the resulting NoC is built and simulated at cycle accurate level in SystemC using macros from the /spl times/pipes library. Also, experiments with six video processing applications show significant savings in bandwidth and communication cost for NMAP algorithm when compared to existing algorithms.

/pdf/bandwidth-constrained-mapping-of-cores-onto-noc-av00hnba6r.pdf

Bandwidth-constrained mapping of cores onto NoC architectures

http://webee.technion.ac.il/~ran/papers/QNoC.pdf

QNoC: QoS architecture and design process for network on chip

This paper presents an architectural study of a scalable system-level interconnection template. We explain why the shared bus, which is today's dominant template, will not meet the performance requirements of tomorrow's systems. We present an alternative interconnection in the form of switching networks. This technology originates in parallel computing, but is also well suited for heterogeneous communication between embedded processors and addresses many of the deep submicron integration issues. We discuss the necessity and the ways to provide high-level services on top of the bare network packet protocol, such as dataflow and address-space communication services. Eventually we present our first results on the cost/performance assessment of an integrated switching network.

/pdf/a-generic-architecture-for-on-chip-packet-switched-4el4cut58z.pdf

Pierre Guerrier

Papers

A generic architecture for on-chip packet-switched interconnections

A Scalable Architecture for System-on-Chip Interconnections