System-Level design automation and optimisation of network-on-chips in terms of timing and energy

Abstract

As system complexity constantly increases, traditional bus-based architectures are less adaptable to the increasing design demands. Specifically in on-chip digital system designs, Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures are promising platforms that have distributed multi-core co-operation and inter-communication. Since the design cost and time cycles of NoC systems are growing rapidly with higher integration, systemlevel Design Automation (DA) techniques are used to abstract models at early design stages for functional validation and performance prediction. Yet precise abstractions and efficient simulations are critical challenges for modern DA techniques to improve the design efficiency. This thesis makes several contributions to address these challenges.

We have firstly extended a backbone simulator, NIRGAM, to offer accurate system level models and performance estimates. A case study of developing a one-to-one transmission system using asynchronous FIFOs as buffers in both the NIRGAM simulator and a synthesised gate-level design is given to validate the model accuracy by comparing their power and timing performance.

Then we have made a second contribution to improve DA techniques by proposing a novel method to efficiently emulate non-rectangular NoC topologies in NIRGAM and generating accurate energy and timing performance. Our proposed method uses time regulated models to emulate virtual non-rectangular topologies based on a regular Mesh. The performance accuracy of virtual topologies is validated by comparing with corresponding real NoC topologies.

The third contribution of our research is a novel task-mapping scheme that generates optimal mappings to tile-based NoC networks with accurate performance prediction and increased execution speed. A novel Non-Linear Programming (NLP) based mapping problem has been formulated and solved by a modified Branch and Bound (BB) algorithm. The proposed method predicts the performance of optimised mappings and compares it with NIRGAM simulations for accuracy validation.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Mark Zwolinski: orcid.org/0000-0002-2230-625X

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