xiv
Preface
Organization: The book consists of 12 chapters. The contents of various
chapters are as follows:
• Chapter 1 presents the evolution of NoC from SoC—its research and
developmental challenges.
• Chapter 2 discusses NoC protocols, elaborating flow control, available network topologies, routing mechanisms, fault tolerance,
quality-of-service support, and the design of network interfaces.
• Chapter 3 presents the router design strategies followed in NoCs.
It elaborates on clocking strategies, first-in first-out (FIFO) design,
globally asynchronous and locally synchronous style of communication, router architecture design for both single- and virtual channel wormhole routers, adaptive router design, and so on.
• Chapter 4 describes the evaluation mechanism of NoC architectures. After introducing the performance and cost metrics, it presents a detailed discussion on traffic modeling, simulator design, and
performance evaluation and comparison between different NoC
structures.
• Chapter 5 presents the application mapping strategies followed in
NoCs. Given an application task graph, several mapping strategies
have been developed to associate the intellectual properties (IPs)
carrying out these tasks with the routers. The chapter enumerates
various strategies such as integer linear programming, constructive
and iterative heuristics, and meta-search techniques for the mapping
problem.
• Chapter 6 reports on low-power design techniques specifically
followed in NoCs. These include various low-power approaches
adopted for NoC design, for example, low-power encoding, on-chip
serialization, low-swing signaling, static voltage scaling, dynamic
voltage scaling, dynamic frequency scaling, voltage–frequency
island partitioning, clock gating, and so on. This chapter also
includes energy–performance trade-offs.
• Chapter 7 discusses on the signal integrity and reliability issues of
NoC. As technology shrinks toward ultra-deep submicron level,
crosstalk, electromagnetic interference, synchronization failures,
and soft errors are the most important factors affecting the system
reliability. This chapter surveys different protection techniques that
have been adopted for NoC design until now. It also focuses on
energy–reliability trade-offs.
• Chapter 8 presents the details of NoC testing strategies reported so
far. NoC testing can be broadly classified into three subproblems:
testing the IP cores, testing the routers, and testing the links. It has a
detailed discussion on each of the three issues.
Preface
Organization: The book consists of 12 chapters. The contents of various
chapters are as follows:
• Chapter 1 presents the evolution of NoC from SoC—its research and
developmental challenges.
• Chapter 2 discusses NoC protocols, elaborating flow control, available network topologies, routing mechanisms, fault tolerance,
quality-of-service support, and the design of network interfaces.
• Chapter 3 presents the router design strategies followed in NoCs.
It elaborates on clocking strategies, first-in first-out (FIFO) design,
globally asynchronous and locally synchronous style of communication, router architecture design for both single- and virtual channel wormhole routers, adaptive router design, and so on.
• Chapter 4 describes the evaluation mechanism of NoC architectures. After introducing the performance and cost metrics, it presents a detailed discussion on traffic modeling, simulator design, and
performance evaluation and comparison between different NoC
structures.
• Chapter 5 presents the application mapping strategies followed in
NoCs. Given an application task graph, several mapping strategies
have been developed to associate the intellectual properties (IPs)
carrying out these tasks with the routers. The chapter enumerates
various strategies such as integer linear programming, constructive
and iterative heuristics, and meta-search techniques for the mapping
problem.
• Chapter 6 reports on low-power design techniques specifically
followed in NoCs. These include various low-power approaches
adopted for NoC design, for example, low-power encoding, on-chip
serialization, low-swing signaling, static voltage scaling, dynamic
voltage scaling, dynamic frequency scaling, voltage–frequency
island partitioning, clock gating, and so on. This chapter also
includes energy–performance trade-offs.
• Chapter 7 discusses on the signal integrity and reliability issues of
NoC. As technology shrinks toward ultra-deep submicron level,
crosstalk, electromagnetic interference, synchronization failures,
and soft errors are the most important factors affecting the system
reliability. This chapter surveys different protection techniques that
have been adopted for NoC design until now. It also focuses on
energy–reliability trade-offs.
• Chapter 8 presents the details of NoC testing strategies reported so
far. NoC testing can be broadly classified into three subproblems:
testing the IP cores, testing the routers, and testing the links. It has a
detailed discussion on each of the three issues.