Mapping real-life applications on run-time reconfigurable NoC-based MPSoC on FPGA

Abstract

Multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoC) are required to fulfill the performance demand of modern real-life embedded applications. These MPSoCs are employing Network-on-Chip (NoC) for reasons of efficiency and scalability. Additionally, these systems need to support run-time reconfiguration of their components to cater to dynamically changing demands of the system. Designing and programming such systems for real-life applications prove to be a major challenge. This paper demonstrates the designing of reconfigurable NoC-based MPSoC and programming it for real-life applications. The NoC is reconfigured at run-time to support different combinations of multiple applications at different times. The platform is verified with a case study executing the parallelized C-codes of a simple producer-consumer and JPEG decoder applications on a NoC-based MPSoC on a Xilinx FPGA. Based on our investigations to map the applications on a 3×3 platform, we show that the NoC reconfiguration overhead is kept at a minimum and the platform utilizes 85% of the total available slices of Virtex-5 FPGA. Moreover, we show that the proposed approach is highly scalable when targeting for large number of applications. © 2010 IEEE.