Tutorial T7A: Techniques for Network-on-Chip (NoC) Design and Test

System-on-Chip (SoC) is a paradigm for designing today’s integrated circuit (IC) chips that puts an entire system onto a single silicon floor (instead of printed circuit boards containing a number of chips accomplishing the system task). With the increasing number of cores integrated on such a chip, on-chip communication efficiency has become one of the key factors in determining the overall system performance and cost. The communication medium used in most of the modern Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) is shared global bus. In spite of fairly simple structure, extensibility, and low area cost of bus, at the system level, it can be used for only upto tens of cores on a single chip. The restriction comes mainly due to the following reasons – non-scalable wire delay with technology shrinking, nonscalable system performance with number of cores attached, decrease in operating frequency with each additional core attached, high power consumption in long wires, etc. Network-on-Chip (NoC) is an emerging alternative that overcomes the abovementioned bottlenecks for integrating large number of cores on a single SoC. NoC is a specific flavor of interconnection networks where the cores communicate with each other using a router based packet switched network. Interconnection networks have been studied for more than last two decades and a solid foundation of design techniques has been reported in the literature. NoC is today becoming an emerging research and development topic including hardware communication infrastructure design, software and operating system services, CAD tools for NoC synthesis, NoC testing, and so on. This tutorial aims at covering the important aspects of NoC design – communication infrastructure design, communication methodology, evaluation framework, mapping of applications onto NoC etc. Apart from these, it also proposes to focus on other upcoming NoC issues, such as, NoC testing, reconfiguration, synthesis and 3-D NoC design.