Network-on-Chip

Preface

System-on-chip (SoC) is a paradigm for designing today’s integrated circuit (IC) chips that put an entire system onto a single silicon floor (instead of printed circuit boards containing a number of chips accomplishing the system task). With the increasing number of cores integrated on such a chip, on-chip communication efficiency has become one of the key factors in determining the overall system performance and cost. The communication medium used in most of the modern SoCs is a shared global bus. In spite of its fairly simple structure, extensibility, and low area cost, at the system level, it can be used for only up to tens of cores on a single chip. This restriction is mainly due to the following reasons: nonscalable wire delay ...