Providing both guaranteed and best effort services using Spatial Division Multiplexing NoC with dynamic channel allocation and runtime reconfiguration

Abstract

To overcome the scalability issue, Network-on-Chip (NoC) communication architectures have been used in today's System-on-Chip. At the same time, more and more applications place increasingly stringent demands on the quality of service for the on-chip communication. Thus it is important to provide guaranteed services to these NoC architectures. We propose a novel solution that maintains the area efficiency of this Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM) approach but improves its utilization of network resources by providing both guaranteed and best effort services. Experimental results show that the proposed solution achieves an area savings of 16%, and maintains a comparable level of performance in terms of data throughput compared to a state-of-the-art approach. © 2008 IEEE.