Modular asynchronous Network-on-Chip: application to GALS systems rapid prototyping

J. Quartana (1) , Laurent Fesquet (1) , Marc Renaudin (1)

1 TIMA - Techniques de l'Informatique et de la Microélectronique pour l'Architecture des systèmes intégrés

This paper presents an innovating methodology for fast and easy design of Asynchronous Network-on-Chips (ANoCs) dedicated to GALS systems. A topology-independent building-block approach permits to design modular and scalable ANoCs with low-power and low-complexity requirements. A crossbar generator is added to the existing design flow for fast system architecture exploration. A multi-clock FPGA allows a fast prototyping of complex ANoC-centric GALS systems. A demonstrative platform is implemented onto an Altera Stratix FPGA. It includes synchronous standard IP cores and asynchronous modules connected through an asynchronous 6x6 crossbar. Results about communication costs across the Asynchronous NoC and synchronous/asynchronous interfaces are reported.

Mots clés: network-on-chip; asynchronous

Domaines: Micro et nanotechnologies/Microélectronique

J. Quartana, Laurent Fesquet, Marc Renaudin. Modular asynchronous Network-on-Chip: application to GALS systems rapid prototyping. VLSI-SOC: From Systems to Chips, (selected contributions from VLSI-SoC 2005), Springer, pp.195-207, 2007, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, ⟨10.1007/978-0-387-73661-7_13⟩. ⟨hal-00192008⟩