Aelite: A flit-synchronous Network on Chip with composable and predictable services

To accommodate the growing number of applications integrated on a single chip, Networks on Chip (NoC) must offer scalability not only on the architectural, but also on the physical and functional level. In addition, real-time applications require Guaranteed Services (GS), with latency and throughput bounds. Traditionally, NoC architectures only deliver scalability on two of the aforementioned three levels, or do not offer GS. In this paper we present the composable and predictable aelite NoC architecture, that offers only GS, based on flit-synchronous Time Division Multiplexing (TDM). In contrast to other TDM-based NoCs, scalability on the physical level is achieved by using mesochronous or asynchronous links. Functional scalability is accomplished by completely isolating applications, and by having a router architecture that does not limit the number of service levels or connections. We demonstrate how aelite delivers the requested service to hundreds of simultaneous connections, and does so with 5 times less area compared to a state-of-the-art NoC.