Networks on Chip: a Communication-centric Approach to Platform-based Design

Embedded system implementations must be flexible, power-efficient and the non-recurring engineering (NRE) cost must be low. To deal with those conflicting requirements a platform-based approach is advocated. Three platform generations are identified. The first generation targets programmable video applications. Computational performance is the challenge and designs are optimized for timing. To control the NRE cost Intellectual Property (IP) blocks are reused as much as possible. In the second generation the bottleneck shifts from computation to communication. Networks on a chip are introduced including layered services. Since the target application domain shifts to mobile applications designs are now optimized for power dissipation. In the third generation systems become smarter, more adaptive and show a lot of interaction with the environment. New Deep Sub-micron problems like variability and soft errors make that designs are now optimized for yield. The layered network-based approach is well suited to solve these problems also.