Design of NoC for SoC with Multiple Use Cases Requiring Guaranteed Performance

Many SoC architectures aimed at the multimedia domain support multiple use cases where only a subset of the applications is active at any time. Further, each multimedia application itself poses strict constraints on core-to-core communication latency. This paper presents an approach for automated synthesis of NoC architectures for such an SoC. We evaluated our design approach through comparisons with two existing techniques aimed at generating best effort and guaranteed throughput designs. Designs generated by our approach showed a marked improvement in both power consumption (12.3% decrease) and resource requirements (12.9% decrease) in comparison to the best effort NoC design approach. In comparison to the existing guaranteed throughput design approach our designs can guarantee core-to-core latency while consuming less power (8.1% decrease) and resources (7.9% decrease).