| Preface | p. v |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| Networks on Chips: Scalable Interconnects for SoCs | p. 1 |
| NoC Design Challenges | p. 4 |
| Book Overview | p. 5 |
| NoC Design Methods | p. 5 |
| NoC Reliability Mechanisms | p. 7 |
| Related Work | p. 7 |
| NoC Architectures and Design Methods | p. 8 |
| Reliability Support for NoCs | p. 10 |
| NoC Design Methods | |
| Designing Crossbar Based Systems | p. 15 |
| Problem Motivation and Application Traffic Analysis | p. 17 |
| Problem Motivation | p. 17 |
| Application Traffic Analysis | p. 19 |
| Design Methodology | p. 19 |
| Exact Approach to Crossbar Synthesis | p. 22 |
| Problem Formulation | p. 22 |
| Exact Crossbar Synthesis Algorithm | p. 24 |
| Heuristic Approach to Crossbar Synthesis | p. 24 |
| Experiments and Case Studies | p. 28 |
| Experimental Platform and Power Models | p. 28 |
| Application Benchmark Analysis | p. 29 |
| Comparisons of Heuristic Engine with the Exact Engine | p. 32 |
| Window Sizing | p. 34 |
| Real-Time Streams & Effect of Binding | p. 36 |
| Overlap Threshold Setting | p. 36 |
| Summary | p. 37 |
| Netchip Tool Flow for NoC Design | p. 39 |
| Front-End Design Phase | p. 39 |
| Architectural Design Phase: The x pipes NoC Library | p. 40 |
| Summary | p. 42 |
| Designing Standard Topologies | p. 43 |
| On-Chip Traffic Modeling | p. 45 |
| Problem Formulation | p. 47 |
| Mapping and Physical Planning Algorithm | p. 50 |
| Physical Planning | p. 51 |
| Experiments and Case Studies | p. 53 |
| Effect of Physical Planning | p. 53 |
| Design for QoS Guarantees | p. 53 |
| VOPD Design | p. 54 |
| Buffer Sizing and Network Optimization | p. 54 |
| Summary | p. 56 |
| Designing Custom Topologies | p. 57 |
| Objectives | p. 57 |
| Background on NoC Topology Synthesis | p. 58 |
| Background on Deadlock-Free NoC Design | p. 59 |
| Input Models | p. 60 |
| Area, Power Models | p. 60 |
| Traffic Models | p. 62 |
| Design Algorithms | p. 62 |
| Experiments and Case Studies | p. 68 |
| Experiments on MPSoC Benchmarks | p. 68 |
| Layout-Level Comparisons | p. 70 |
| Impact of Frequency Constraints | p. 72 |
| Handling Dynamic Effects | p. 74 |
| Summary | p. 74 |
| Supporting Multiple Applications | p. 77 |
| The &AE;thereal NoC Architecture | p. 78 |
| Switch/NI Architecture | p. 79 |
| Dynamic NoC Reconfiguration | p. 79 |
| Design Methodology | p. 80 |
| Use-Case Preprocessing | p. 82 |
| Unified Mapping-NoC Configuration | p. 83 |
| Simulation Results | p. 89 |
| Experimental Benchmarks | p. 89 |
| Effect of Mapping for SoC Benchmarks | p. 90 |
| Frequency-Area Trade-offs | p. 90 |
| Dynamic Configuration | p. 92 |
| Parallel Use-Cases | p. 93 |
| Summary | p. 93 |
| Supporting Dynamic Application Patterns | p. 95 |
| NoC Design Challenges for CMPs | p. 95 |
| Basics of the Synthesis Approach | p. 97 |
| Design Flow | p. 98 |
| Problem Formulation | p. 99 |
| Synthesis Algorithm | p. 101 |
| NoC Link Sizing | p. 102 |
| Timing Feasibility Check | p. 105 |
| Algorithm Run-Time | p. 105 |
| Experimental Results | p. 105 |
| Experiments on a Mesh Topology | p. 106 |
| Effect of Core Injection Rates | p. 107 |
| Effect of Different NoC Sizes | p. 108 |
| Effect of Link Length | p. 110 |
| Application to Torus Topology | p. 110 |
| Validating Design Flow Predictability | p. 111 |
| Summary | p. 112 |
| NoC Reliability Mechanisms | |
| Timing-Error Tolerant NoC Design | p. 117 |
| The Double Sampling Technique | p. 118 |
| Using Links as a Storage Medium | p. 120 |
| T-error Link Designs | p. 123 |
| Scheme 1: Low overhead T-error Links | p. 123 |
| Scheme 2: High-Performance T-error Links | p. 126 |
| Aggressive Switch/NI Design | p. 128 |
| Output Buffer Changes | p. 128 |
| Input Buffer Changes | p. 129 |
| Dynamic Configuration of the NoC | p. 130 |
| Experimental Results | p. 131 |
| Simulation Platform | p. 131 |
| Experiments on a Multi-Media Benchmark | p. 131 |
| Effect of Application-Level Power Management | p. 134 |
| Experiments on Other Benchmarks | p. 134 |
| Effect of NoC Configuration | p. 138 |
| Choice of Link Design Schemes | p. 138 |
| Synthesis Results | p. 139 |
| Summary | p. 139 |
| Analysis of NoC Error Recovery Schemes | p. 141 |
| Switch Architecture Design | p. 142 |
| End-to-End Error Detection | p. 142 |
| Switch-to-Switch Error Detection | p. 143 |
| Hybrid Single Error Correcting, Multiple Error Detecting Scheme | p. 143 |
| Energy Estimation and Models | p. 144 |
| Energy Estimation | p. 144 |
| Error Models | p. 144 |
| Experiments and Simulation Results | p. 144 |
| Power Consumption of Schemes for Fixed Residual Error Rates | p. 144 |
| Performance Comparison of Reliability Schemes | p. 146 |
| Power Consumption Overhead of Reliability Schemes | p. 146 |
| Effect of Buffering Requirements, Traffic Patterns and Packet Size | p. 149 |
| Summary | p. 151 |
| Fault-Tolerant Route Generation | p. 153 |
| Multi-Path Routing with In-Order Delivery | p. 155 |
| Path Selection Algorithm | p. 156 |
| Multipath Traffic Splitting | p. 160 |
| Fault-Tolerance Support with Multipath Routing | p. 161 |
| Resilience Against Transient Errors | p. 161 |
| Resilience Against Permanent Errors | p. 162 |
| Simulation Results | p. 164 |
| Area, Power and Timing Overhead | p. 164 |
| Case Study: MPEG Decoder | p. 164 |
| Comparisons with Single-Path Routing | p. 165 |
| Effect of Fault-Tolerance Support | p. 166 |
| Summary | p. 167 |
| NoC Support for Reliable On-Chip Memories | p. 169 |
| Analysis of Multimedia Software | p. 170 |
| Baseline SoC Architecture and Extensions | p. 172 |
| SoC Template Architecture | p. 172 |
| Proposed Hardware Extensions | p. 173 |
| Run-Time Fault Tolerant Schemes | p. 176 |
| Permanent Error Recovery Support | p. 177 |
| Intermittent Error Recovery Support | p. 178 |
| Experimental Results | p. 178 |
| Performance Studies | p. 179 |
| Architectural Exploration of NoC Features | p. 182 |
| Effects of Varying Percentages of Critical Data | p. 183 |
| Synthesis Results | p. 184 |
| Summary | p. 186 |
| Conclusions and Future Directions | p. 187 |
| Putting It All Together | p. 187 |
| Bibliography | p. 191 |
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