Floorplanning driven Network-on-Chip synthesis for 3-D SoCs

As technology advances, 3-D stacking of silicon layers is emerging as a promising approach to address the integration challenges faced by current System-on-Chips (SoCs). Designing efficient Network- on-Chips (NoCs) is necessary to handle the 3-D interconnect complexity. In this paper, we present a four-stage synthesis approach to determine the power-performance efficient 3-D NoC topology for the application. First, we propose an algorithm to explore optimal clustering of cores during 3-D floorplanning. Then, an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) algorithm is proposed to place switches and network interfaces on the 3-D floorplan. Thirdly, a power and timing aware path allocation algorithm is carried out to determine the connectivity across different switches. Last, a min-cost max-flow based algorithm is proposed for Through-Silicon Via (TSV) assignment to minimize the link power consumption. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.