Evaluation of SNMP-like protocol to manage a NoC emulation platform

International audience—The Networks-on-Chip(NoCs) are currently the most appropriate communication structure for many-core embedded systems. AnFPGA-based emulation platform can drastically reduce the time needed to evaluate a NoC, even if it is composed by tens or hundreds of distributed components. These components should be timely managed in order to execute an evaluation traffic scenario. There is a lack of standard protocols to drive FPGA-based NoC emulators. Such protocols could ease the integration of emulation components developed by different designers. In this paper, we evaluate a light version of SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to manage an FPGA-based NoC emulation platform. The SNMP protocol and its related components are adapted to a hardware implementation. This facilitates the configuration of the emulation nodes without FPGA-resynthesis, as well as the extraction of emulation results. Some experiments highlight that this protocol is quite simple to implement and very efficient for a light resources overhead

A survey of NoC evaluation platforms on FPGAs

International audienceNetworks-on-chip (NoCs) have become a de factocommunication standard for many core systems-on-chip (SoCs).A NoC has large design space composed of several parameterssuch as routing algorithm, task mapping, flow control method,among others. SoC designers deeply rely on automatic evaluationtools in order to deal with the complexity of NoC design. Animportant class of NoCs evaluation tools are the platforms basedon FPGAs, which improve the evaluation time and precisionwhen compared to other solutions like software simulators andanalytical models. In this paper, we survey propositions ofFPGA tools for NoC evaluation by using a layered model, whichcovers aspects like network architecture, traffic generation andinterface to the host P