Abstract:
It is predicted that future integrated circuits that will contain more than one billion
transistors will allow much more complex designs than possible today. System on Chip
(SoC) design involves the integration of such numerous heterogeneous semiconductor
intellectualproperty (SIP) blocks. The success of this approach depends on the seamless
integration of cores like processors, memories, Universal Asynchronous Receiver
Transmitters(UART),etc.
Someof the main problemsassociatedwith futureSoCdesign arise fromnon-scalableglobal
wire delays,failureto achieveglobal synchronizationwith a single clock, errors due to signal
integrity issues, on-chip communication delays and difficulties associated with nonscalablebus-
basedfunctionalinterconnects.One approach to address these problems is to
make a Network on Chip (NoC) that handles communication over the chip using a
variant of traditional network communications.
This research describes a general purpose Network on Chip simulator, which is
capable of simulating various topologies. The implementation details of the simulator
have been described. The assumptions about the network setup and simulation
environment and parameters are also described. The external and internal configuring
processes are also described. The switching techniques and details of some routing
algorithm for NoC are described with examples. The simulator is based on some of
the OSI reference model layers, with the layers individually represented as
exchangeable modules. A suitable model of execution and a hierarchical model of a
NoC have been designed and implemented. The implemented general purpose
simulator can be configured for any topology and routing algorithm to measure
vanous performance parameters. Both synchronous and asynchronous
communications are supported in this simulator. The IP nodes can be configured to
wide range of different clock rates different than that of the NoC switches. The
extensive simulation result for various topologies and various network configurations
are analyzed.
