Synthesis of Low Power NOC Topologies under Bandwidth Constraints

We propose an efficient design flow for the automatic synthesis of Networkon-Chip (NOC) topologies. The specification of the problem is given as a netlist of IP cores and their communication requirements. Each IP is characterized by its area. A communication constraint is denoted by its source and destination IP and a minimum bandwidth requirement. Together with the specification, the users provides a percentage of the chip area that they want to allocate for the communication network. Then, given the clock period of the network (that we assume to be synchronous), and a target technology, the proposed design flow explores the entire topology space and returns an optimal NOC where each router has a position and a routing table assigned. We consider two optimality criteria: power consumption and power delay product. Our design flow, which is based on an approximation algorithm, is efficient and highlights the delicate trade-off balance between cost of communication and cost of switching.