Classifying Virtual Channel Access Control Schemes for Asynchronous NoCs

Several asynchronous NoC implementations have been proposed in the literature so far, providing different properties based on different assumptions and flow control strategies. Most often they are presented as monolithic solutions, making it difficult to associate the different implementation details with the achieved properties, or to identify interdependencies of choices. The key contribution of this paper will be to elaborate a generic framework for requirements on and properties of asynchronous NoCs with virtual channels that shall allow to isolate specific choices and ease the comparison between existing solutions. We will demonstrate this by aligning some of the solutions from the literature to our framework. To illustrate the usefulness of our scheme we will apply it for pinpointing a deficiency in an existing protocol and systematically elaborating a way to fix this issue.