Contention-free and application-specific Network-on-Chip generation for embedded systems

Praca prezentuje metodologię generowania dedykowanych topologii bezkolizyjnych dla systemów wbudowanych, realizowanych w architekturze sieci jednoukładowych (ang. Network on Chip, NoC). Kombinacja uszeregowania zadań i transmisji systemu z nowym sposobem doboru topologii i rutingu w sieci NoC eliminuje kolizje transmisyjne, zapewniając jednocześnie spełnienie ograniczeń czasowych nałożonych na projektowaną aplikację. Przeprowadzone eksperymenty dowodzą przewagi zaprezentowanego rozwiązania nad typowymi metodami budowania sieci NoC.Although Network-on-Chip (NoC) [1] architectures present an interesting alternative to bus-based multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs), they also need some effort to tackle communication contention problem. In this work the authors propose an efficient approach to application-specific irregular topology generation for contention-free NoC. There is taken advantage of a priori knowledge of the communication characteristic of the application (embedded system) to perform computation, communication scheduling and route generation with regard to performance constraints (Fig. 1). In the result there is obtained customized and minimal topology. The clear benefits of the authors' approach are: complete removal of network contention, simple router architecture without virtual channels, minimal network topology (in term of links necessary to guarantee contentionless communication), which meets system latency constraint, and input model of the system derived from co-synthesis of the embedded systems domain [6]. As demonstrated through experiments, this approach achieves far better performance than typical, random mesh networks and is comparable with well-known bandwidth-based solutions [3] (Tables 1, 3). In the resource-requirement field (interconnection fabric, Table 2) the authors' NoC is more saving than meshes (on average of 35%) and bandwidth-based custom topologies (on average of 25%)