Digital systems engineering
Digital Clocks for Synchronization and Communications
Digital Clocks for Synchronization and Communications
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Network-on-Chip (NoC) is an alternative to traditional busses for faster interconnect mechanism. The aim is to have infinite scalability, and this implies the possibility to extend the on-chip NoC communication protocol off-chip. To gain wholesome advantage of Network-on-Chip (NoC), off-chip extensions should also have similar communication throughput compared to the on-chip network. Faster data-rate is the single most demanded requirement of modern applications. There is a continuous drive to fulfill this escalating demand as much as possible. Two of the most prominent limiting factors in achieving this purpose are 'reduced accuracy' and 'protocol handling', especially in case of systems which do not have synchronous communication. Efficient optimizations are needed in multiple areas to upgrade the speed of data transfer. This paper presents an improved off-chip network solution to a slower and error-prone board-bridge part of a Network-on-Chip (NoC). The new solution increases the accuracy and speed of the plesiochronous off-chip extension to the NoC. The Network-on-Chip has 16 processor-nodes implemented on four interconnected plesiochronous Altera Stratix-II FPGA boards in 4x4 configuration in such a way that each board hosts a Quad-core NoC.