Separated Address/Data Network Design for Bus Protocol compatible Network-on-Chip

Abstract

As the number of cores and IPs increase in multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC), network-on-chip (NoC) has emerged as a promising novel interconnection architecture for its parallelism and scalability. However, minimization of the latency in NoC with legacy bus IPs must be addressed. In this paper, we focus on the latency minimization problem in NoC which accommodates legacy bus protocol based IPs considering the trade-offs between hop counts and path collisions. To resolve this problem, we propose separated address/data network for independent address and data phases of bus protocol. Compared to Mesh and irregular topologies generated by TopGen, experimental results show that average latency and execution time are reduced by 19.46% and 10.55%, respectively.