Dynamically Reconfigurable NoC for Future Heterogeneous Multi-core Architectures
To increase the efficiency of NoCs and to efficiently utilize the available hardware resources, a novel dynamically reconfigurable NoC (drNoC) is proposed in this chapter. Exploiting the notion of hardware reconfigurability, the proposed drNoC reconfigures itself in terms of switching, routing and packet size with the changing communication requirements of the system at run time, thus utilizing the maximum available channel bandwidth. In order to increase the applicability of drNoC, the network interface is designed to support OCP socket standard. This makes drNoC a highly re-useable communication framework, qualifying it as a communication centric platform for high data intensive SoC architectures. Simulation results show a 32% increase in data throughput and 22-35% decrease in network delay when compared with a traditional NoC with fixed parameters.