FPGA Prototyping and Design Evaluation of a NoC-Based MPSoC

Abstract

Abstract-Chip communication architectures become an important element that is critical to control when designing a complex MultiProcessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC). This led to the emergence of new interconnection architectures, like Network-on-Chip (NoC). NoCs have been proven to be a promising solution to the concerns of MPSoCs in terms of data parallelism. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) has some perceived challenges. Overcoming those challenges with the right prototyping solutions is easy and cost-effective leading to much faster time-to-market. In this paper, we present an FPGA based on rapid prototyping in hardware/software co-design and design evaluation of a mixed HW/SW MPSoC using a NoC. A case study of two-dimensional mesh NoC-based MPSoC architecture is presented with a validation environment. The synthesis and implementation results of the NoC-based MPSoC on a Virtex 5 ML 507 enable a reasonable frequency (151.5 MHz) and a resource usage rate equals to 58% (6,586 out of 11,200 slices used).