×pipes Lite: A Synthesis Oriented Design Library For Networks on Chips

Submitted on behalf of EDAA (http://www.edaa.com/)International audienceThe limited scalability of current bus topologies for Systems on Chips (SoCs) dictates the adoption of Networks on Chips (NoCs) as a scalable interconnection scheme. Current SoCs are highly heterogeneous in nature, denoting homogeneous, preconfigured NoCs as inefficient drop-in alternatives. While highly parametric, fully synthesizeable (soft) NoC building blocks appear as a good match for heterogeneous MPSoC architectures, the impact of instantiation-time flexibility on performance, power and silicon cost has not been quantified yet. This work details ×pipes Lite, a design flow for automatic generation of heterogeneous NoCs. ×pipes Lite is based on highly customizable, high frequency and low latency NoC modules, that are fully synthesizeable. Synthesis results provide with modules that are directly comparable, if not better, than the current published state-of-the-art NoCs in terms of area, power, latency and target frequency of operation measurements