Contention-free and Application-specific Network-on-Chip Generation for Embedded Systems

Although Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures present an interesting alternative to bus-based multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs), they also need some effort to tackle communication contention problem. In this work we propose an efficient approach to application-specific irregular topology generation for contention-free NoC. We take advantage of a priori knowledge of the communication characteristic of the application (embedded system) to perform computation and communication scheduling and route generation with regard for performance constraints. In the result we obtain customized and minimal topology. During topology generation we take into consideration energy and resource issues, so our methodology assumes simple router architecture and minimal number of links. Provided experimental results confirm benefits of our methodology.