Network-on-Chip Assembler Language

Network-on-chip (NoC) is deemed to be a paradigm to tackle design challenges in the billion transistor era. A NoC provides a reusable platform for integrating heterogeneous resources. This report discusses application design on NoC. We propose Network-on-Chip Assembler Language (NoC-AL) that serves an interface between NoC implementations and applications, very similar to the instruction set of a traditional CPU. A central part of NoC-AL is communication primitives. Every instance of a NoC must come with a NoC assembler, which translates NoC-AL programs into a set of NoC configuration files which are in turn handled by standard tools for hardware and software design. In this report, we motivate our NoC application design approach, and discuss NoC communications, in particular, channel communication. Moreover we define two sets of basic communication primitives for the two interprocess communication styles, message passing and shared memory. Furthermore, we discuss language binding and layers for implementing the NoC communication primitives.