Route packets, not wires: on-chip inteconnection networks
Proceedings of the 38th annual Design Automation Conference
Interconnection Networks: An Engineering Approach
Interconnection Networks: An Engineering Approach
Networks on Chip: A New Paradigm for Systems on Chip Design
Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe
A Network on Chip Architecture and Design Methodology
ISVLSI '02 Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI
SPIN: A Scalable, Packet Switched, On-Chip Micro-Network
DATE '03 Proceedings of the conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe: Designers' Forum - Volume 2
NoC Synthesis Flow for Customized Domain Specific Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Performance Evaluation and Design Trade-Offs for Network-on-Chip Interconnect Architectures
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Towards reliable 5Gbps wave-pipelined and 3Gbps surfing interconnect in 65nm FPGAs
Proceedings of the ACM/SIGDA international symposium on Field programmable gate arrays
CONNECT: re-examining conventional wisdom for designing nocs in the context of FPGAs
Proceedings of the ACM/SIGDA international symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays
X-Network: An area-efficient and high-performance on-chip wormhole interconnect network
Microprocessors & Microsystems
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A fundamental difference between application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) is that the wires in ASICs are designed to match the requirements of a particular design. Conversely, in an FPGA, the area is fixed and the routing resources exist whether or not they are used. In this paper, we investigate how well several common network topologies map onto a modern FPGA routing fabric. Different multiprocessor network topologies with between 8 and 64 nodes are mapped to a single large FPGA. Except for the fully-connected networks, it is observed that the difference in logic resources used and routing overhead among these topologies is insignificant for the systems tested. Fully-connected networks up to about 22 nodes are also feasible on the same FPGA although the logic and routing utilization clearly grows much faster. The conclusion is that a modern FPGA fabric is very rich in resources and capable of supporting highly interconnected topologies. For systems with a modest number of nodes implemented on current large FPGAs, it is not necessary to use the connectivity-limited topologies typically used for networks-on-chip. Rather, direct point-to-point connections between all communicating nodes can be considered.