VLSI Design
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 68432, 16 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/68432
Research Article

A Unified Approach to Mapping and Routing on a Network-on-Chip for Both Best-Effort and Guaranteed Service Traffic

Andreas Hansson,1 Kees Goossens,2,3 and Andrei Rădulescu3

1Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, MB Eindhoven 5600, The Netherlands
2Computer Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology, GA Delft 2600, The Netherlands
3SOC Architectures and Infrastructure, Research, NXP Semiconductors, AE Eindhoven 5656, The Netherlands

Received 15 October 2006; Accepted 4 March 2007

Academic Editor: Davide Bertozzi

Copyright © 2007 Andreas Hansson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

One of the key steps in Network-on-Chip-based design is spatial mapping of cores and routing of the communication between those cores. Known solutions to the mapping and routing problems first map cores onto a topology and then route communication, using separate and possibly conflicting objective functions. In this paper, we present a unified single-objective algorithm, called Unified MApping, Routing, and Slot allocation (UMARS+). As the main contribution, we show how to couple path selection, mapping of cores, and channel time-slot allocation to minimize the network required to meet the constraints of the application. The time-complexity of UMARS+ is low and experimental results indicate a run-time only 20% higher than that of path selection alone. We apply the algorithm to an MPEG decoder System-on-Chip, reducing area by 33%, power dissipation by 35%, and worst-case latency by a factor four over a traditional waterfall approach.