Design and Evaluation of a Parameterizable NoC Router for FPGAs

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) approach for designing (System-on-Chip) SoCs is currently emerging as an advanced concept for overcoming the scalability and efficiency problems of traditional on-chip interconnection schemes. This thesis addresses the design and evaluation of a parameterizable NoC router for FPGAs. The importance of low area overhead for NoC components is crucial in FPGAs, which have fixed logic and routing resources. We achieve a low area router design through optimizations in switching fabric and dual purpose buffer/connection signals. We propose a component library to increase re-use and allow tailoring of parameters for application specific NoCs of various sizes. A set of experiments were conducted to explore the design space of the proposed NoC router using different values of key router parameters: channel width (flit size), arbitration scheme and IP-core-to-router mapping strategy. Area and latency results from the experiments are presented and analyzed

Speed-up run-time reconfiguration implementation on FPGAs

International audienceReconfigurable computing is certainly one of the most important emerging research topics over the last few years, in the field of digital processing architectures. The introduction of run-time reconfiguration (RTR) on FPGAs requires appropriate design flows and methodologies to fully exploit this new functionality. For that purpose we present an automatic design generation methodology for heterogeneous architectures based on Network on Chip (NoC) and FPGAs that eases and speed-up RTR implementation. We focus on how to take into account specificities of partially reconfigurable components during the design generation steps. This method automatically generates designs for both fixed and partially reconfigurable parts of a FPGA with automaticmanagement of the reconfiguration process. Furthermore this automatic design generation enables reconfiguration pre-fetching techniques to minimize reconfiguration latency and buffer merging techniques to minimize memory requirements of the generated design. This concept has been applied to different wireless access schemes, based on a combination of OFDM and CDMA techniques. The implementation example illustrates the benefits of the proposed design methodology

Experimental Comparison of Store-and-Forward and Wormhole NoC Routers for FPGA\u27s

Network on Chip (NoC) is an interconnection paradigm which is scalable and efficient for connecting increasing number of components on Field Programmable Systems on Chip (FPSOC). The router is a key component in NoC that impacts area performance, power consumption, etc. In this thesis we evaluate and compare two different router designs using real world benchmark. The first router uses Store-And-Forward strategy (SAF) and XY routing algorithm and the second router uses Wormhole (WH) as forwarding strategy and source routing algorithm. These routers were used to implement 4x4 mesh NoCs. A multi processor system benchmark obtained from Altera was implemented in each NoC. This enabled us to evaluate and compare the routers using the real world benchmark design. The evaluation metrics used were area, throughput, power consumption and maximum clock frequency. Experiment results show that the SAF router is superior to the WH Router

Bibliometric Review of NoC Router Optimization

Network on chip (NoC) has been proposed as an emerging solution for scalability and performance demands of next generation System on Chip (SoC). NoC provides a solution for the bus based interconnection issue of SoC, where large numbers of Intellectual Property modules (IP) are integrated on a single chip for better performance. The NoC has several advantages such as scalability, low latency and low power consumption, high bandwidth over dedicated wires and buses. Interconnections between multiple chip cores have a significant impact on the communication and performance of the chip design in terms of region, latency, throughput and power. In the NoC architecture, the router is a dominant component that significantly affects the performance of the NoC. NoC router architectures evolved since the year 2002 and progress in the domain pertaining to the optimization in the NoC router architectures has been discussed. The key objective of this bibliometric review is to understand the extent of the existing literature in the domain of performance efficient NoC router architectures. The bibliometric analysis is primarily based on data extracted from Scopus. It reveals that major contributions are done by researchers from USA, China followed by India in the form of conference, journals and articles publications. The major contribution is by the subject areas of Computer Science and Engineering followed by Mathematics and Material Science. The geographical analysis is done by using the GPS visualize tool. The clusters were created using Gephi

Experimental Evaluation of an NoC Synthesis Tool

Rapid growth in the number of IP cores in SoCs resulted in the need for effective and scalable interconnect scheme for system components - Network-on-Chip (NoC). Design and implementation of an NoC from scratch is very time consuming and limits the NoC design space that can be explored. In this thesis we evaluate and compare NoC synthesis tool CONNECT with manually generated NoC design using Altera Quartus II. Three sizes of ring, mesh and torus NoC topologies are used for evaluation based on two metrics: logic resource utilization and maximum clock frequency. For larger NoC sizes manual design provides up to 85% reduction in area utilization. With respect to maximum clock frequency, CONNECT provides superior results for all NoC sizes, providing up to 80% higher clock frequency. These results provide an insight into the area versus frequency tradeoffs when using the CONNECT NoC synthesis tool

NoC Prototyping on FPGAs: Component Design, Architecture Implementation and Comparison

Continuing improvements in integrated circuit technology over the past few decades enables increasingly large and complex Systems-on-Chip. Due to the large number of components used, the traditional bus-based interconnect scheme becomes cumbersome and restrictive. Hence, the Network-on-Chip interconnect paradigm becomes appealing due to its many advantages such as scalability and superior performance. Much research remains to be done exploring NoC architectures using real world benchmarks. In this thesis we describe the design space exploration of two major NoC components; a flexible adapter based on the Altera Avalon standard and a parameterizable wormhole router. Two well known NoC architectures, torus and ring, were synthesized for Altera FPGAs using these NoC components. The architectures were compared on the basis of packet latency, area and throughput, using a benchmark application. Simulation results show that the ring architecture gives superior area versus performance tradeoffs for the benchmark used

Design Space Exploration of FPGA-Based NoC Routers

Currently, FPGAs serve as Field–Programmable–Systems–on–Chip (FPSoCs) and are widely used to implement computationally intensive applications. As the number of components in FPSoCs increases, the interconnect schemes based on Network–on–Chip (NoC) approach are increasingly used. Routers greatly impact the performance and cost of NoCs. In this thesis, we explore the design space of FPGA–based NoC routers. We implement three types of packet switched NoC routers on a Stratix II FPGA using parameterized VHDL models. To reduce the area and increase the speed, we use novel techniques. Buffer size is decreased by minimizing the number of control fields in a packet. Both edges of the clock are utilized, and credit based flow control is used to accelerate the router. The proposed routers were evaluated based on area, frequency, and zero load latency. Synthesis results and zero load latency evaluations show that they are significantly superior to widely referenced, previously proposed routers

Multi-Softcore Architecture on FPGA

To meet the high performance demands of embedded multimedia applications, embedded systems are integrating multiple processing units. However, they are mostly based on custom-logic design methodology. Designing parallel multicore systems using available standards intellectual properties yet maintaining high performance is also a challenging issue. Softcore processors and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are a cheap and fast option to develop and test such systems. This paper describes a FPGA-based design methodology to implement a rapid prototype of parametric multicore systems. A study of the viability of making the SoC using the NIOS II soft-processor core from Altera is also presented. The NIOS II features a general-purpose RISC CPU architecture designed to address a wide range of applications. The performance of the implemented architecture is discussed, and also some parallel applications are used for testing speedup and efficiency of the system. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed multicore system, which achieves better speedup than the GPU (29.5% faster for the FIR filter and 23.6% faster for the matrix-matrix multiplication)