NoC – Network on Chip

SEMINAR PRESENTATION

BY

ANKIT THARWANI
DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING
MALAVIYA NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JAIPUR
 What are SoC’s and NoC’s?
According to Wikipedia:
--“System-on-chip refers to integrating all components of a
computer or other electronic system into a single
integrated circuit (chip).”

--“Network-on-a-chip (NoC) is a new paradigm for System-

on-Chip (SoC) design. The NoC solution brings a
networking method to on-chip communications and
claims roughly a threefold performance increase over
conventional bus systems.”
 System on Chip (SoC)
•With many tens of million
transistors available on a
single chip, the System-on-
Chip (SOC) has become a
reality.

•Design with IP reuse is

mandatory .
Integrated processor cores,
DSPs, on-chip memories,
IP-blocks, etc…are commonly
in use.
 Traditional SoC nightmare
 Variety of dedicated interfaces
 Design and verification complexity
 Unpredictable performance
 Many underutilized wires

DMA CPU DSP

Control
signals
CPU Bus
A
Bridge
B Peripheral Bus
IO IO IO
C
Evolution of on-chip communication
Network on Chip: A paradigm Shift in
VLSI
From: Dedicated signal wires To: Shared network

s s s

Module

s s s
Modul
Modul
e
e

s s s

Point- Computing Network

To-point Module switch
Link
 NoC essential
s s s

Module

s s s
Modul
Modul
e
e

s s s

• Communication by packets of bits

• Routing of packets through several hops, via switches
• Efficient sharing of wires
• Parallelism
 Critical problems addressed by NoC

1) Global interconnect design problem:

delay, power, noise, scalability, reliability

2)System integration
productivity problem

3) Chip Multi Processors

(key to power-efficient computing)
From buses to networks
 Regular Network on Chip

PE PE PE

PE PE PE Router PE

PE PE PE
Generic On-Chip Router
Data abstractions
 Layers of abstraction in network
modeling
 Software layers
 Application, OS
 Network & transport layers
 Network topology e.g. crossbar, ring, mesh, torus, fat tree,…
 Switching Circuit / packet switching etc.
 Addressing Logical/physical, source/destination, flow, transaction
 Routing Static/dynamic, distributed/source, deadlock avoidance
 Quality of Service e.g. guaranteed-throughput, best-effort
 Congestion control, end-to-end flow control
 Data link layer
 Flow control (handshake)
 Handling of contention
 Correction of transmission errors
 Physical layer
 Wires, drivers, receivers, repeaters, signaling, circuits,..
 OSI Layered Model
• Open System Interconnect (OSI) Model is general purpose
network model
• NoC employs at present Physical layer, Data Link Layer and
Network Layer in detail
Typical NoC design flow

Place
Modules

Determine routing
and adjust link
capacities
 NoC Topology
The connection map between PEs

 Adopted from large-scale networks and

parallel computing
 Topology classifications:
 Direct topologies
 Indirect topologies
 Direct topologies
 Each switch (SW) connected to a single PE
 As the # of nodes in the system increases, the
total bandwidth also increases

PE PE

1 PE is SW SW
connected
to only a single
SW SW SW

PE PE
 Indirect topologies
A set of PEs are connected to a switch (router)

Fat tree topology Butterfly topology

SW

SW SW

SW SW SW SW

PE PE PE PE PE PE PE PE
 NoC Switching Strategies
Switching determines how flits and packets flows
through routers in the network

 There are two basic modes:

 Circuit switching
 Packet switching

Adaptive Systems Laboratory, Univ. of Aizu 19

 Circuit Switching
 Network resources (channels) are reserved before a packet is sent
 Entire path must be reserved first
 The packets do not contain routing information, but rather data
and information about the data.
 Circuit-switched networks require no overhead for packetization,
packet header processing or packet buffering
 Once circuit is setup, router latency and control overheads are very
low
 Very poor use of channel bandwidth if lots of short packets must
be sent to many different destinations
 More commonly seen in embedded SoC applications where traffic
patterns may be static and involve streaming large amounts of
data between different IP blocks
 Packet Switching
Store and Forward (SAF)
 We can aim to make better use of channel resources
by buffering packets. We then arbitrate for access
to network resources dynamically.
 Packet is sent from one router to the next only if the
receiving router has buffer space for entire packet
 Buffer size in the router is at least equal to the size
of a packet Forward packet by packet

Buffer
Buffer Buffer
Switch Switch Switch
packet
Store and Forward switching

data flit header flit

 Bibliography
 Wikipedia – System on Chip
 Wikipedia – Network on Chip
 Guerrier and Greiner (2000) “A generic architecture for on-
chip packet-switched interconnections”
 Hemani et al. (2000) “Network on chip: An architecture for
billion transistor era”
 De Micheli and Benini (2002) “Networks on chip: A new
paradigm for systems on chip design”
Thank You