Performance-driven assignment and mapping for reliable networks-on-chips

Abstract

Network-on-chip (NoC) communication architectures present promising solutions for scalable communication requests in large system-on-chip (SoC) designs. Intellectual property (IP) core assignment and mapping are two key steps in NoC design, significantly affecting the quality of NoC systems. Both are NP-hard problems, so it is necessary to apply intelligent algorithms. In this paper, we propose improved intelligent algorithms for NoC assignment and mapping to overcome the drawbacks of traditional intelligent algorithms. The aim of our proposed algorithms is to minimize power consumption, time, area, and load balance. This work involves multiple conflicting objectives, so we combine multiple objective optimization with intelligent algorithms. In addition, we design a fault-tolerant routing algorithm and take account of reliability using comprehensive performance indices. The proposed algorithms were implemented on embedded system synthesis benchmarks suite (E3S). Experimental results show the improved algorithms achieve good performance in NoC designs, with high reliability.