Addressing the system-on-a-chip interconnect woes through communication-based design
Proceedings of the 38th annual Design Automation Conference
Route packets, not wires: on-chip inteconnection networks
Proceedings of the 38th annual Design Automation Conference
Extending Platform-Based Design to Network on Chip Systems
VLSID '03 Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on VLSI Design
A Network on Chip Architecture and Design Methodology
ISVLSI '02 Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI
Contrasting a NoC and a traditional interconnect fabric with layout awareness
Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe: Proceedings
Toward a scalable test methodology for 2D-mesh Network-on-Chips
Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe
A NoC system generator for the Sea-of-Cores era
Proceedings of the 8th FPGAWorld Conference
MCAPI abstraction on FPGA based SoC design
Proceedings of the Annual FPGA Conference
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The Multi-Core NoC is a 4 by 4 Mesh NoC targeted for Altera FPGAs. It implements a deflective routing policy and is used to connect sixteen NIOS II processors. Each NIOS II is connected to the NoC via an address-mapped Resource Network Interface. The Multi-Core NoC is implemented on four separate Altera Stratix II FPGA boards, each hosting a Quad-Core NoC, which operates on a local 50 MHz clock. It has an onboard throughput of 650 Mbps (12.5 MFlit/s), and uses 28% of the LUs, 18% of the ALUTs, 22 % of the dedicated registers and 31% of the total memory blocks of a Stratix II FPGA. Asynchronous clock bridges, with a throughput of 50 Mbps (~1MFlit/s), are used for the inter-board communication. Application programs use an MPI compatible Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) to communicate with the Resource Network Interface of the NoC. The RNI sets up message transfer, with a maximum length of 512 bytes, and sends flits with the size of 32 bit data plus 20 bit headers through the network. The MPI is the bottleneck of the system; it takes 46 us (43.4 kPackets/s) to send a minimum-sized packet through the protocol stack to a near neighbour and bounce it back to the original application. The bounce-back time for a far neighbour is 56 us.