Affiliations: VLSI Design and Testing Center, Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Democritus University of Thrace, 67100,
Xanthi, Greece | Microprocessors and Digital Systems Lab, School of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens,
15780 Zografou, Greece
Abstract: Modern embedded consumer devices execute complex network and
multimedia applications that require high performance and low energy
consumption. For implementing complex applications on Network-on-Chips (NoCs),
a design methodology is needed for performing exploration at NoC system-level,
in order to select the optimal application-specific NoC architecture, serving
the application requirements in the best way. The design methodology we present
in this paper is based on the exploration of different NoC characteristics and
is supported by a flexible NoC simulator which provides the essential
evaluation metrics in order to select the optimal communication parameters of
the NoC architectures. We illustrated that it is possible with the evaluation
metrics provided by the simulator we present, to perform exploration of several
NoC aspects and select the optimal communication characteristics for NoC
platforms having network and multimedia applications as the target domains.
With our methodology we can achieve a gain of 57% in the Energy × Delay
Product on average.
