NoCScope: A graphical interface to improve Networks-on-Chip monitoring and design space exploration

As the number of cores increase in a single chip, networks-on-chip (NoCs) are more and more the chosen solution to communicate intra chip cores. Most of the NoCs so far have been successfully implemented on hardware description languages and its debugability based on waveforms. For really exploring and monitoring NoCs, a more high level abstraction description of the NoC and a more user friendly interface is required and presented in this work. New algorithms and ideas can be created for the NoC and executed together with the target application. Besides the usual text or visual outputs that the application may have, embedded software developers may take advantage of the following monitors to know what is happening on each port of each router of the NoC: input traffic, output traffic, hot spot information, power consumption, buffer occupation, end to end and point to point connections. One application is presented and two different improved mappings are presented based on the information given by the monitors.