Performance evaluation and design tradeoffs of on-chip interconnect architectures

Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been proposed as an alternative to bus-based schemes to achieve high-performance and scalability in System-on-Chip (SoC) design. Performance analysis and evaluation of on-chip interconnect architectures are widely based on simulations, which become computationally expensive, especially for large-scale NoCs. In this paper, a Network Calculus-based methodology is presented to analyze and evaluate the performance and cost metrics, such as latency and energy consumption. The 2D Mesh, Spidergong, and WK-Recursive on-chip interconnect architectures are analyzed using this methodology and results are compared with those produced using simulations. The values obtained by simulations and by analysis show similar trends in the same order of magnitude. Furthermore, WK outperforms the other on-chip interconnects in all considered metrics. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.