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EDA Tech Forum journal is a quarterly publication for the Electronics Design Automation community including design engineers, engineering managers, industry executives, and academia. EDA Tech Forum journal provides an ongoing medium in which to discuss, debate, and communicate the electronic design automation industry’s most pressing issues, challenges, methodologies, problem-solving techniques, and trends.

A pragmatic approach to evaluating NoC strategies

Network-on-chip (NoC) could prove to be an effective methodology that addresses interconnect roadblocks to the development of more complex systems-on-chip. However the term covers many approaches, some of which – simple enhancement to existing bus technologies, the costly adaptation of theoretical networking concepts – fall short either in terms of performance or NREs.

The article identifies a number of ‘practical’ challenges, which a technologically and economically viable NoC methodology must address. These include:

  • Optimized support for many transactions of different sizes that occur in parallel;
  • An ability to interconnect many, varying and sometimes proprietary IP blocks and cope with their quality of service (QoS) requirements;
  • The minimization of transport wires for easier and less expensive bufferization and pipelining;
  • The co-management of initiators’ QoS requirements with efficient access to memory controllers.

A key element in a well-designed NoC system, the network interface unit (NIU), is described in detail and in function. These NIUs gather initiator transactions into a packet, or convert a packet back into a transaction for the target. This mechanism is more efficient than encapsulation and provides true interoperability between multiple protocols on the same chip.

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