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High-level customization framework for application-specific NoC architectures

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Abstract

Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been recognized as the new paradigm to interconnect and organize a high number of cores. NoCs address global communication issues in System-on-Chips (SoC) involving communication-centric design and implementation of scalable communication structures evolving application-specific NoC design as a key challenge to modern SoC design. In this paper we present a SystemC customization framework and methodology for automatic design and evaluation of regular and irregular NoC architectures. The presented framework also supports application-specific optimization techniques such as priority assignment, node clustering and buffer sizing. Experimental results show that generated regular NoC architectures achieve an average of 5.5 % lower communication-cost compared to other regular NoC designs while irregular NoCs proved to achieve on average 4.5×higher throughput and 40 % network delay reduction compared to regular mesh topologies. In addition, employing a buffer sizing algorithm we achieve a reduction in network’s power consumption by an average of 45 % for both regular and irregular NoC design flow.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dionisios Diamantopoulos (NTUA, Greece) for the help he provided regarding the hardware amount of the routers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Athens, Greece

    Iraklis Anagnostopoulos, Alexandros Bartzas & Dimitrios Soudris

  2. Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway

    Iason Filippopoulos

Authors
  1. Iraklis Anagnostopoulos
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  2. Alexandros Bartzas
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  3. Iason Filippopoulos
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  4. Dimitrios Soudris
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Iraklis Anagnostopoulos.

Additional information

The research activities that led to these results, were cofinanced by Hellenic Funds and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Hellenic National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) 2007–2013, according to Contract no. MICRO2-E-B/E-II of the Project “Next Generation Millimeter Wave Backhaul Radio” within the Programme “Hellenic Technology Clusters in Microelectronics—Phase-2 Aid Measure”.

This work has been performed when I. Filippopoulos was a member of NTUA.

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Anagnostopoulos, I., Bartzas, A., Filippopoulos, I. et al. High-level customization framework for application-specific NoC architectures. Des Autom Embed Syst 16, 339–361 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10617-013-9114-5

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