Addressing Multicore Communication Challenges Using NoC Technology

The need for application performance at acceptable power densities and energies has led to increasing use of multicore processor architectures across a wide range of end markets. While some designs focus on a single tightly-coupled cluster of a few homogeneous CPU´s, many multicore implementations in the embedded markets use heterogeneous processing architectures to optimize cost, performance, and energy. Appropriate use of networking technology appears to be an attractive approach to address the functional and scaling issues in loosely-coupled heterogeneous multicore designs. This paper discusses work in the area of NoC technology, with a specific focus on promising techniques and production designs. We show that the toughest task in NoC design appears to be choosing which techniques to borrow from data and communications networks for the applications.