A system-level design methodology for application-specific networks-on-chip

Modern embedded consumer devices execute complex network and multimedia applications that require high performance and low energy consumption. For implementing complex applications on Network-on-Chips (NoCs), a design methodology is needed for performing exploration at NoC system-level, in order to select the optimal application-specific NoC architecture, serving the application requirements in the best way. The design methodology we present in this paper is based on the exploration of different NoC characteristics and is supported by a flexible NoC simulator which provides the essential evaluation metrics in order to select the optimal communication parameters of the NoC architectures. We illustrated that it is possible with the evaluation metrics provided by the simulator we present, to perform exploration of several NoC aspects and select the optimal communication characteristics for NoC platforms having network and multimedia applications as the target domains. With our methodology we can achieve a gain of 57% in the Energy × Delay Product on average.