Cost considerations in network on chip

Systems on Chip (SoCs) require efficient inter-module interconnection providing for the required communications at a low cost. We analyze the generic cost in area and power of Networks on Chip (NoCs) and alternative interconnect architectures: a shared bus, a segmented bus and a point-to-point interconnect. For each architecture we derive analytical expressions for area, power dissipation and operating frequency as well as asymptotic limits of these functions. The analysis quantifies the intuitive NoC scalability advantages. Next we turn to NoC cost optimization. We explore cost tradeoffs between the number of buffers and the link speed. We use a reference architecture, termed QNoC (Quality-of-Service NoC), which is based on a grid of wormhole switches, shortest path routing and multiple QoS classes. Two traffic scenarios are considered, one dominated by short packets sensitive to queuing delays and the other dominated by large block-transfers. Our simulations show that network cost can be minimized while maintaining quality of service, by trading off buffers with links in the first scenario but not in the second. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.