Evaluation and design trade-offs between circuit-switched and packet-switched NOCs for application-specific SOCs

ABSTRACT

NOC architectures have to deliver good latency-throughput performance in the face of very tight power and area budgets. However, the latency and the power consumption for transferring information down the transmitter stack, through the channel, and up the receiver stack might be unacceptably high. In this paper, we evaluate the designs of packet-switched and the proposed circuit-switched NOCs in detail, and we advocate using circuit-switched NOC as it is more attractive for application-specific SOC designs because of communication localization. We implement and synthesize the designs of packet-switched and circuit-switched NOCs, and we take multimedia applications as our case studies. The experimental results show that the area, latency and the energy consumption of packet-switched NOC are much larger than that of circuit-switched NOC.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.4 INPUT/OUTPUT AND DATA COMMUNICATIONS
      B.4.3 Interconnections (subsystems)
          Subjects: Topology (e.g., bus, point-to-point)

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
NOC, SOC, application-specific designs, low-power