DMA
NI
Switch
Switch
Switch
Switch
Switch
Switch
NoC
DRAM NI
NI
MPEG
NI
DSP
Accel
NI
CPU
NI
4
Network-on-Chip
Figure 1.2
The NoC paradigm. (Data from Angiolini, F., NoC Architectures, n.d., http://www-micrel.deis
.unibo.it/MPHS/slidecorso0607/nocsynth.pdf.)
communication links between them. Routers route the packets from the
source node to the destination node depending on the underlying network
topology and routing strategy. The length of the point-to-point links should
be small to reduce wire delay.
To mitigate the ever increasing design productivity gap and to meet the
time-to-market requirement, reuse of IP cores is widely used in SoC development. Besides IP cores, the bus interface protocol can also be reused to integrate the IPs. While reuse is one of the key challenges that IC design houses
try to address, reuse of IPs, NI, and communication infrastructure such as
routers, underlying network, and flow control protocols can be adopted
in the NoC paradigm. Although selection of network topology and router
architecture is purely application specific, reusing these in different applications will not give the optimal solution. Hence, the reusability is limited
to a particular type of applications. For example, the network topology and
router architecture used for mobile application cannot be same as those of
video processing application. For similar applications, the design and verification effort due to reuse will be drastically reduced.
NoC is a specific flavor of interconnection networks and involves several
abstraction layers such as physical, data link, network, and transport layers
(Jantsch and Tenhunen 2003), which are described as follows:
• The physical layer determines the number and length of wires connecting resources and switches.
• The data link layer defines the protocol of communication between
a resource and a switch, and between the two switches. Both the
NI
Switch
Switch
Switch
Switch
Switch
Switch
NoC
DRAM NI
NI
MPEG
NI
DSP
Accel
NI
CPU
NI
4
Network-on-Chip
Figure 1.2
The NoC paradigm. (Data from Angiolini, F., NoC Architectures, n.d., http://www-micrel.deis
.unibo.it/MPHS/slidecorso0607/nocsynth.pdf.)
communication links between them. Routers route the packets from the
source node to the destination node depending on the underlying network
topology and routing strategy. The length of the point-to-point links should
be small to reduce wire delay.
To mitigate the ever increasing design productivity gap and to meet the
time-to-market requirement, reuse of IP cores is widely used in SoC development. Besides IP cores, the bus interface protocol can also be reused to integrate the IPs. While reuse is one of the key challenges that IC design houses
try to address, reuse of IPs, NI, and communication infrastructure such as
routers, underlying network, and flow control protocols can be adopted
in the NoC paradigm. Although selection of network topology and router
architecture is purely application specific, reusing these in different applications will not give the optimal solution. Hence, the reusability is limited
to a particular type of applications. For example, the network topology and
router architecture used for mobile application cannot be same as those of
video processing application. For similar applications, the design and verification effort due to reuse will be drastically reduced.
NoC is a specific flavor of interconnection networks and involves several
abstraction layers such as physical, data link, network, and transport layers
(Jantsch and Tenhunen 2003), which are described as follows:
• The physical layer determines the number and length of wires connecting resources and switches.
• The data link layer defines the protocol of communication between
a resource and a switch, and between the two switches. Both the