Case study: Deployment of the 2D NoC on 3D for the generation of large emulation platforms

The evaluation of Network-On-Chip (NoC) architectures is an up to date problem in the design of System-on-Chip. Emulation on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is used to cover all possible NoC solutions in a reduced exploration time. Emulation requires multi-FPGA platform as the resources for large NoC is important and cannot be handling by one FPGA. In the same time, SoC community is exploring 3D technology for the next generation of large SoC with 3D NoC, making emulation more complex. This paper presents a case study of the deployment of the 2D NoC structure to 3D. A design flow is proposed for the automatic generation of a NoC targeting 3D on multi-FPGAs. The flow integrates emulation blocks used for the validation and exploration on the NoC. With this automatic aided tool, the designer can evaluate and explore the NoC architecture and extract performances of the NoC regardless of the multi-component platform. One may expect a communication performance improvement using an adapted partitioning of the NoC, as highlighted by the results given in this paper.