Integrated core selection and mapping for mesh based Network-on-Chip design with irregular core sizes

Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been proposed to replace traditional bus based System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture to address the global communication challenges in nanoscale technologies. A major challenge in NoC based system design is to select Intellectual Property (IP) cores for implementing tasks and associate the selected cores to the routers to optimize cost and performance. These are commonly known as the process of core selection and application mapping respectively. In this paper, integrated core selection and mapping problem has been addressed. Mesh architecture has been considered for experimentation. The integrated core selection and mapping problem takes as input the application task graph, topology graph and a core library. It outputs the selected cores for the tasks and their mapping onto the topology graph, such that, all communication requirements of the application are satisfied. The cores present in a core library may perform more than one task and have non-uniform sizes. For this, a technique based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) has been proposed to select cores from the given core library and map the resultant core graph onto mesh based architectures. An efficient heuristic for mapping has also been proposed, which maps the selected cores onto mesh based architectures, considering non-uniform core sizes. Comparisons have been carried out with step-by-step core selection and mapping approach and also with mapping algorithms that exist in the literature. Significant reductions have been observed in terms of communication cost over all the cases. Area comparisons have also been made. On average, improvement of 13.05% in communication cost and 2.07% in area have been observed. The proposed approach has also been compared in dynamic environment and significant reductions in the average network latency could be observed. On average, improvement of 5.48% in average network latency and 15.68% in network throughput has been observed. Comparison of energy consumption has also been done in both the cases.