This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. An Application-Specific Design Methodology for On-Chip Crossbar Generation

Abstract — Designing a power efficient interconnection architecture for Multi-processor Systems on Chips (MPSoCs), satisfying the application performance constraints is a non-trivial task. In order to meet the tight time-to-market constraints and to effectively handle the design complexity, it is essential to provide CAD tool support for automating this task. In this work, we address the issue of application-specific design of optimal crossbar architecture, satisfying the performance requirements of the application and optimal binding of the cores onto the crossbar resources. We present a simulation based design approach that is based on analysis of actual traffic trace of the application, considering local variations in traffic rates, temporal overlap among traffic streams and criticality of traffic streams. Our approach is physical design aware, where the wiring complexity of the crossbar architecture is also considered during the design process. This leads to detectin