Shuang Liu

Zusammenfassung

Network-on-Chip (NoC) offers a promising solution for on-chip communication in highly integrated System-on-Chips (SoCs). NoCs can be designed with either regular or application-specific network topologies. While regular topologies are easy to design, they are not ideal for systems with heterogeneous processing elements (PEs) that vary in size. The design of application-specific NoCs, however, involves several interrelated problems that impact each other. This work addresses the challenges in the synthesis of application-specific NoCs by proposing an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) framework. This framework enables the co-design of major problems, including floorplanning, routing topology generation, routing path construction, and application mapping. Although the ILP framework can be applied to each problem individually or in a stepwise manner, the co-design of these interconnected problems allows synthesis steps to interact, enabling designers to explore the entire design space. Using this framework, we have analyzed various design configurations in the synthesis of application-specific NoCs.

Zusammenfassung

Chiplet-based systems have become prominent in large Systems-on-Chips (SoCs) as a means to mitigate increasing design costs. However, the integration of multiple chiplets introduces new challenges in the interconnection network, potentially leading to deadlocks. In this paper, we propose an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) based design approach to address this issue. Our method considers various design factors for deadlock-free routing, such as topology, latency, load balancing, path diversity, and fault tolerance, applicable to both general-purpose chiplets and application-specific chiplets. It facilitates the determination of optimal turn restrictions for general-purpose chiplets or constructs optimal deadlock-free routing paths for application-specific chiplets if the communication patterns are known. The results demonstrate the capability of the method to find optimal solutions under various design considerations.