Network on Chip and Key Research Problems

System-on-chip (SoC) designs provide integrated solutions to challenging design problems in the telecommunications, multimedia, and consumer electronics domains. However, the communication subsystem gradually becomes a bottleneck of SoC as the technology of semiconductor has a great progress and complexity of system increased. Network-on-chip (NoC) can meet the distinctive challenges of providing a communication subsystem for SoC. This paper prompts NoC can be defined as a layered communication subsystem of complex SoC, sketches a simple network-on-chip example and analyses the characteristics of NoC, layered communication protocol and some key research problems.