The Chip Is the Network: Toward a Science of Network-on-Chip Design

In this survey, we address the concept of network in three different contexts representing the deterministic, probabilistic, and statistical physics-inspired design paradigms. More precisely, we start by considering the natural representation of networks as graphs and discuss the main deterministic approaches to Network-on-Chip (NoC) design. Next, we introduce a probabilistic framework for network representation and optimization and present a few major approaches for NoC design proposed to date. Last but not least, we model the network as a thermodynamic system and discuss a statistical physics-based approach to characterize the network traffic. This formalism allows us to address the network concept in the most general context, point out the main limitations of the proposed solutions, and suggest a few open-ended problems.