Meshim: A high-level performance simulation platform for three-dimensional network-on-chip

Three dimensional network-on-chip (3D NoC) is motivated to achieve better performance, functionality, and packaging density compared to 2D NoC. To facilitate performance evaluation for the design stage, an accurate and flexible environment for simulating the 3D NoC performance is necessary. In this paper, we present a complete high-level simulation platform for 3D NoC called Meshim, based on SystemC, including models for processors, mesh-based communication architecture, and memory models. To demonstrate that our simulation platform is a powerful tool for 3D NoC design stage, we use our platform to explore the performance of architectures based on real applications. The simulation results show that our implemented 3D NoC architecture provides better performance than 2D NoC architecture, and this distinction becomes more obvious when the workload grows up.