Advance in semiconductor technologies enables seamless integration of hundreds of cores on a single silicon die, which requires high communication performance. To deal with the increasing communication complexity of System-on-Chip (SoC), Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been recently proposed as an alternative to the conventional point-to-point links and bus based communication fabrics. In practice, to facilitate NoC design evaluation and optimization, Poisson traffic or Bernoulli traffic models are generally assumed. However, actual measurements showed that real high speed network traffic always has strong correlations. The objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of traffic correlations on the performance of NoC design. Experimental results show that traffic correlation degrades the performance of NoC design and unrealistic traffic assumptions may yield unacceptable designs.
Cooperative virtual channel router for adaptive hardwired FPGA network-on-chip