Performance- and Cost-Aware Topology Generation Based on Clustering for Application-Specific Network on Chip

摘要

A clustering-based topology generation approach is proposed to construct Network-on-Chip (NoC) topologies for given applications. By exploiting communication requirements of the given application and characteristics of the router architectures, the approach constructs custom irregular NoC topology in four phases with design constraints specific to the application. Specially, a recursion based link construction algorithm embedded in the topology generation is proposed to construct links between routers. The proposed approach together with the recursive algorithm significantly reduces the network communication latency, power consumption, routers area and resource costs. The evaluation performed on various multimedia benchmark applications confirms the efficiency of the proposed approach. Experimental results show that the approach saves about 60% of the communication latency, power consumption and router area as compared to those using regular Mesh topology. Significant network resource improvement is also achieved. Moreover, the approach performs well for two multimedia applications compared to existing algorithms.