A floorplan-aware interactive tool flow for NoC design and synthesis

Abstract

In this paper we present a floorplan-aware toolchain for NoC design and synthesis integrated with a graphical front-end. The resulting design methodology is highly automated yet entails rich interaction with the user, spanning across traffic flow specification, topology synthesis and physical floorplanning, with back-annotation capabilities and opportunities for incremental design. We exploit the proposed tool to implement some NoC-based case studies. We show that not only a great amount of time and effort can be saved thanks to the easy-to-use proposed environment, but also that the quality of the final netlist improves due to the optimizations unlocked by the early-stage interaction among the designer and the proposed toolchain.

Application-Specific Heterogeneous Network-on-Chip Design

“…One of them is Versatile Place and Route (VPR) [3], which is a packing, placement and routing tool that minimizes the routing area. Kakoee et al [22] develop another tool that is claimed to be more interactive. A survey on NoC design was conducted by Murali et al [34] who also design an application-specific NoC with floor-plan information.…”