"Design and Evaluation of a Parameterizable NoC Router for FPGAs" by Michael Brugge

Date of Award

2009

Publication Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.Sc.

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Keywords

Engineering, Electronics and Electrical.

Supervisor

Khalid, Mohammed (Computer Engineering)

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) approach for designing (System-on-Chip) SoCs is currently emerging as an advanced concept for overcoming the scalability and efficiency problems of traditional on-chip interconnection schemes. This thesis addresses the design and evaluation of a parameterizable NoC router for FPGAs. The importance of low area overhead for NoC components is crucial in FPGAs, which have fixed logic and routing resources. We achieve a low area router design through optimizations in switching fabric and dual purpose buffer/connection signals. We propose a component library to increase re-use and allow tailoring of parameters for application specific NoCs of various sizes. A set of experiments were conducted to explore the design space of the proposed NoC router using different values of key router parameters: channel width (flit size), arbitration scheme and IP-core-to-router mapping strategy. Area and latency results from the experiments are presented and analyzed.

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