POSEIDON: A Framework for Application-Specific Network-on-Chip Synthesis for Heterogeneous Chip Multiprocessors

Soohyun Kwon1,  Sudeep Pasricha2,  Jeonghun Cho1
1Kyungpook National University, 2Colorado State University


Abstract

In recent years, the rise in the number of cores being integrated on a single chip has led to a greater emphasis on scalable communication fabrics that can overcome data transfer bottlenecks. Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures have been gaining widespread acceptance as communication backbones for multi-core systems, due to their high scalability, predictability, and performance. However, NoCs are also power hungry, and synthesizing a NoC fabric for a particular application requires solving a multitude of non-trivial design problems. Due to the large design space associated with various possible NoC configurations and design constraints, it is critical to automate the exploration process and arrive at a customized NoC that meets performance goals, while minimizing power and peak temperature. In this paper, we present a novel application specific NoC synthesis framework (POSEIDON) that combines multiple algorithms and heuristics to efficiently explore the solution space. Our results indicate that the proposed framework provides a reduction of up to 15.7% in power consumption, 21.08% in average latency, 27.05% in total energy, and 42.7% in energy-delay product compared to state-of-the-art approaches, as well as a 4.2% reduction in peak temperature when the framework is customized for thermal-aware synthesis.