Memory-centric network-on-chip for power efficient execution of task-level pipeline on a multi-core processor

For flexible mapping of various task-level pipelines on a multi-core processor, the authors proposed the memory-centric network-on-chip (NoC). The memory-centric NoC manages producer–consumer data transactions between the tasks in the case of task-level pipelines are distributed over multiple processing cores. Since the memory-centric NoC manages the data transactions, it relieves burden of the software running on the processing cores and this results in power-efficient execution of task-level pipeline. To prove advantages of the memory-centric NoC, the authors implemented a multi-core processor based on the memory-centric NoC.