A Virtual Prototype of Scalable Network-on-Chip Design

Abstract

A Virtual Prototype of Network-on-Chip (NoC) that interconnects IPs in System-on-Chip is presented in this thesis. A Virtual Prototype is a software model describing various components of NoC put together for simulation and experiments of large SoCs (System-on-Chips). It is a practical way to validate interconnection and working of SoCs with a large number of components in scalable manner. In spite of extensive studies on NoC design, a virtual prototype of NoC is unavailable to academic community. The proposed cycle accurate model of NoC is perhaps the first academic virtual prototype of NoC (VPNoC). The VPNoC can provide similar functionalities as the NoC in the existing simulators. Furthermore, since it is implemented on Carbon SoC Designer, an ARM based SoC development tool, it can be applied directly to current/future SoC design. The proposed VPNoC has been used to demonstrate the design of two SoC applications. In this study, we have achieved: 1) designs and implementations of the NoC components and the VPNoC, 2) measurement of throughput and latency for the VPNoC, and 3) two data intensive applications and their performance analysis.