A study on communication issues for systems-on-chip

Present days cores composing a system-on-chip might be interconnected by means of both dedicated channels or shared buses. Nevertheless, future systems will have strong requirements on reusability and communication performance, which will constrain the use of such interconnect systems. An emerging approach, the networks-on-chip (NOCs), will potentially fulfill those requirements, because NOCs are reusable and their communication performance gracefully scales with the system growth. However, it is still not clear when the use of NOCs will become mandatory. This work introduces some studies to define the switching point when NOCs become the preferred communication architecture. A bus and a NOC are modeled and compared by using a set of mathematical models.