System-level design of networks-on-chip for heterogeneous systems-on-chip

The network-on-Chip (NoC) is a critical subsystem for many large-scale systems-on-chip (SoC). We present a complete framework for the design and optimization of NoCs at the system-level. By combining a library of pre-designed configurable NoC modules specified in SystemC with high-level synthesis, we can generate a variety of alternative 2D-Mesh NoC architectures for a given SoC. We also support the automatic synthesis of network interfaces to translate between IP-specific messages and NoC flits. We demonstrate our approach with the design-space exploration of two complete SoCs running complex applications on a high-end FPGA board.