An Address-Oriented Transmit Mechanism for GALS NoC

Since Network-on-Chip (NoC) uses network interfaces (NIs) to improve the design productivity, by now, there have been a few papers addressing the design and implementation of a NI module. However, none of them considered the difference of address encoding methods between NoC and the traditional bus-shared architecture. On the basis of this difference, in the paper, we introduce a transmit mechanism to solve such a problem for global asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) NoC. Furthermore, we give the concrete implementation of the NI module in this transmit mechanism. Finally, we evaluate its performance and area overhead by a VHDL-based cycle-accurate RTL model and simulation results confirm the validity of this address-oriented transmit mechanism.

Authors:

• Yuanyuan Zhang
• Guang Sun
• Li Su
• Depeng Jin
• Lieguang Zeng

Keywords:

• Network-on-Chip
• Network Interface
• Open CoreProtocol
• Address.

References:

[1] W.J. Dally and B. Towles, "Route packets, not wires: On-chip
interconnection networks," in Proceeding of the 38th Design Automation
Conference (DAC01), vol.1, pp.684-689, 2001.
[2] P. P. Pande, C. Grecu, M. Jones, A. Ivanov, and R. Saleh, "Performance
evaluation and design trade-offs for network-on-chip interconnect
architectures," IEEE Trans. Comput.., vol 54, no. 8, pp. 1025-1040, 2005.
[3] R. Marculescu, U.Y. Ogras, L.S. Peh, N.E. Jerger and Y. Hoskote,
"Keynote Paper Outstanding Research Problems in NoC Design: System,
Microarchitecture, and Circuit Perspectives," IEEE Trans on
compuer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems, vol. 28, no. 1, pp.
3-21, 2009.
[4] A. Radulescu, J. Dielissen, K. Goossens, E. Rijpkema, and P. Wielage,
"An efficient on-chip network interface offering guaranteed services,
shared-memory abstraction, and flexible network configuration," in
Proceeding of the 2004 Design, Automation and Test in Europe
Conference (DATE04 ), 2004.
[5] T. Bjerregaard, S. Mahadevan, R. G. Olsen, and J. Spars├©, An OCP
compliant network adapter for GALS-based SoC design using MANGO
network-on-chip," in Proceedings of International Symposium on
System-on-Chip (SOC05), pp, 171-174, 2005.
[6] http://www.ocpip.org/