Contrasting a NoC and a traditional interconnect fabric with layout awareness

  • Authors:
  • Federico Angiolini;Paolo Meloni;Salvatore Carta;Luca Benini;Luigi Raffo

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy;University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy;University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy;University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy;University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe: Proceedings
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Increasing miniaturization is posing multiple challenges to electronic designers. In the context of Multi-Processor System-on-Chips (MPSoCs), we focus on the problem of implementing efficient interconnect systems for devices which are ever more densely packed with parallel computing cores. Easily seen that traditional buses can not provide enough bandwidth, a revolutionary path to scalability is provided by packet-switched Network-on-Chips (NoCs), while a more conservative approach dictates the addition of bandwidth-rich components (e.g. crossbars) within the pre-existing fabrics. While both alternatives have already been explored, a thorough contrastive analysis is still missing. In this paper, we bring crossbar and NoC designs to the chip layout level in order to highlight the respective strengths and weaknesses in terms of performance, area and power, keeping an eye on future scalability.