Designing efficient irregular networks for heterogeneous systems-on-chip

Networks-on-chip will serve as the central integration platform in future complex systems-on-chip (SoC) designs, composed of a large number of heterogeneous processing resources. Most researchers advocate the use of traditional regular networks like meshes, tori or trees as architectural templates which gained a high popularity in general-purpose parallel computing. However, most SoC platforms are special-purpose tailored to the domain-specific requirements of their application. They are usually built from a large diversity of heterogeneous components which communicate in a very specific, mostly irregular way.In this work, we propose a methodology for the design of customized irregular networks-on-chip, called INoC. We take advantage of a priori knowledge of the communication characteristic of the application to generate an optimized network topology and routing algorithm. We show that customized irregular networks are clearly superior to traditional regular architectures in terms of performance at comparable implementation costs for irregular workloads. Even more, they inherently offer a high degree of scalability and expansibility which allows to adapt the network to an arbitrary number of nodes with a given communication demand. This can normally not be accomplished by traditional approaches.