Reconfigurable Architectures for Wireless Systems: Design Exploration and Integration Challenges

Mobile devices are severely power and area limited due to battery capacity and system size. In many of these example systems, advanced features require computationally complex signal processing on high-speed data streams for enhanced networking capabilities. Thus, mapping high-level communication and networking algorithms to system architectures is a complex and challenging procedure. An important challenge is to characterize the area, time, and power requirements of these embedded system modules and to use this information effectively to determine the architecture of programmable, reconfigurable, and fixed-function modules. In this paper, we will focus on application examples in wireless networking which highlight these challenges in reconfigurable systems integration.Nokia CorporationTexas Instruments IncorporatedNational Science Foundatio

Performance Analysis of Routing Algorithms in 2D Mesh Based NoC Under Varying Load Using Support Vector Machine

The paper presents the performance analysis of routing techniques on 3x3 mesh NOC topology. The effect of load variation in delay and total network energy for different types of routing is observed. The simulation is performed on the NOXIM network on chip simulator under random traffic conditions. The research involves developing of the classification model based on support vector machine for the performance analysis of both deterministic and adaptive routing schemes. The quality parameters provided as input to the model against the performance of routing algorithms based on Network-onChip platform are minimum delay, minimum energy and maximum throughput

Cognitive Sensor Platform

This paper describes a platform that is used to build embedded sensor systems for low energy implantable applications. One of the key characteristics of the platform is the ability to reason about the environment and dynamically modify the operational parameters of the system. Additionally the platform provides to ability to compose application specific sensor systems using a novel computational element that directly supports a synchronous-dataflow (SDF) programming paradigm. Cognition in the context of a sensor platform is defined as the “process of knowing, including aspects of awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment”.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v4i4.568

An Efficient On-Chip Network Interface Offering Guaranteed Services, Shared-Memory Abstraction, and Flexible Network Configuration

In this paper we present a network interface for an on-chip network. Our network interface decouples computation from communication by offering a shared-memory abstraction, which is independent of the network implementation. We use a transactionbased protocol to achieve backward compatibility with existing bus protocols such as AXI, OCP and DTL. Our network interface has a modular architecture, which allows flexible instantiation. It provides both guaranteed and best-effort services via connections. These are configured via network interface ports using the network itself, instead of a separate control interconnect. An example instance of this network interface with 4 ports has an area of 0.143mm in a 0.13m technology, and runs at 500 MHz

Routing Aware Switch Hardware Customization for Networks on Chips

Networks on Chip (NoC) has been proposed as a scalable and reusable solution for interconnecting the ever- growing number of processor/memory cores on a single silicon die. As the hardware complexity of a NoC is significant, methods for designing a NoC with low hardware overhead, matching the application requirements are essential. In this work, we present a method for reducing the hardware complexity of the NoC by automatically configuring the architecture of the NoC switches to suit the application traffic characteristics. The crossbar matrix and the arbiters of each switch in the NoC design are customized to support the traffic flows utilizing that switch. This application- specific switch customization is integrated with an existing design flow, which automates NoC topology synthesis, mapping, RTL code and physical layout generation. Several experimental studies on NoC benchmark designs are carried out, which show that the proposed switch customization technique leads to large reduction in the NoC switch area (28% on average) and power consumption (21% on average). Moreover, the critical paths of the switches reduce significantly, thereby leading to a significant speed-up of the NoC design

Mapping and Configuration Methods for Multi-Use-Case Networks on Chips

To provide a scalable communication infrastructure for Systems on Chips (SoCs), Networks on Chips (NoCs), a communication centric design paradigm is needed. To be cost effective, SoCs are often programmable and integrate several different applications or use-cases on to the same chip. For the SoC platform to support the different use-cases, the NoC architecture should satisfy the performance constraints of each individual use-case. In this work we motivate the need to consider multiple use-cases during the NoC design process. We present a method to ef ciently map the applications on to the NoC architecture, satisfying the design constraints of each individual use-case. We also present novel ways to dynamically recon- gure the network across the different use-cases and explore the possibility of integrating Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVS/DFS) techniques with the use-case centric NoC design methodology. We validate the performance of the design methodology on several SoC applications. The dynamic recon guration of the NoC integrated with DVS/DFS schemes results in large power savings for the resulting NoC systems

SUNMAP: A Tool for Automatic Topology Selection and Generation for NoCs

Increasing communication demands of processor and memory cores in Systems on Chips (SoCs) necessitate the use of Networks on Chip (NoC) to interconnect the cores. An important phase in the design of NoCs is the mapping of cores onto the most suitable topology for a given application. In this paper, we present SUNMAP a tool for automatically selecting the best topology for a given application and producing a mapping of cores onto that topology. SUNMAP explores various design objective such as minimizing average communication delay, area, power dissipation subject to bandwidth and area constraints. The tool supports different routing functions (dimension ordered, minimum-path, traffic splitting) and uses floorplanning information early in the topology selection process to provide feasible mappings. The network components of the chosen NoC are automatically generated using cycle-accurate SystemC soft macros from xpipes architecture. SUNMAP automates NoC selection and generation, bridging an important design gap in building NoCs. Several experimental case studies are presented in the paper, which show the rich design space exploration capabilities of SUNMAP

System level modeling methodology of NoC design from UML-MARTE to VHDL

International audienceThe evolution of the semiconductor technology caters for the increase in the System-on-Chip (SoC) complexity. In particular, this complexity appears in the communication infrastructures like the Network-on-Chips (NoCs). However many complex SoCs are becoming increasingly hard to manage. In fact, the design space, which represents all the concepts that need to be explored during the SoC design, is becoming dramatically large and difficult to explore. In addition, the manipulation of SoCs at low levels, like the Register Transfer Level (RTL), is based on manual approaches. This has resulted in the increase of both time-to-market and the development costs. Thus, there is a need for developing some automated high level modeling environments for computer aided design in order to handle the design complexity and meet tight time-to-market requirements. The extension of the UML language called UML profile for MARTE (Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded systems) allows the modeling of repetitive structures such as the NoC topologies which are based on specific concepts. This paper presents a new methodology for modeling concepts of NoC-based architectures, especially the modeling of topology of the interconnections with the help of the repetitive structure modeling (RSM) package of MARTE profile. This work deals with the ways of improving the effectiveness of the MARTE standard by clarifying and extending some notations in order to model complex NoC topologies. Our contribution includes a description of how these concepts may be mapped into VHDL. The generated code has been successfully evaluated and validated for several NoC topologies