A Network-on-Chip emulation framework for OFDM system based on FPGAs

In the field of integrated circuit design, the on-chip communications for parallel computations are increased rapidly. Due to the low efficiency of the traditional bus-based structure of System-on-Chip (SoC), Networks-on-Chip (NoC) is emerging as a predominant substitute for interconnection in SoC. Meanwhile, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technique has becoming a popular research topic in the thriving wireless mobile communication area. This paper proposes how to implement OFDM system on a NoC platform, which is composed by 4×4 2-D mesh tiles in Xilinx Virtex-IV FPGA arrays. Wormhole switching, deterministic routing and Virtual Output Queuing (VOQ) mechanism are adopted in the switch and router design. All Processing Elements (PEs) are homogeneous, and implemented by PowerPC cores embedded within the Xilinx Virtex-IV FPGAs. In addition, a network interface (NI) has been designed to control the data transactions between switching node and PE. Our experiment proves the Network on Chip emulation framework for OFDM system.