A holistic approach to network-on-chip synthesis

Application specific Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures have emerged as a leading technology to address the communication woes of multi-processor System-on-Chip architectures. Synthesis approaches for custom NoC must address several requirements including cumulative bandwidth and transaction level (TL) communication requirements, multiple application use-cases, deadlock avoidance, and router port bandwidth and arity constraints. In this paper we present a holistic algorithm for NoC synthesis which is able to address all these requirements together in an integrated manner. The approach is able to generate designs that consume minimum dynamic power consumption, and at most twice the number of routers (and leakage power) as an optimal solution. In terms of performance the technique is able to generate NoC designs with very low average communication latencies (verified by actual simulations) and equally low standard deviation (jitter) while utilizing simple best effort routers. We evaluated the effectiveness and quality of the proposed technique by comparisons with two existing approaches. Extensive experimental results are presented for synthetic/realistic multiple use case applications, cumulative/transaction traffic requirements, increasing application bandwidth requirements, and different port arity constraints.