A novel communication strategy between PE and NI in NoC-based MPSoC

More and more computing cores will be integrated in the future SoC to deal with the growing application requirement. For such Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) with high integration and large complexity, one key issue is the on-chip communication among various cores. By the way of analyzing the communication process, this paper proves that the bottleneck of inter-core communication is the interaction between computing and communicating element. Targeting high efficiency of such interaction, a novel interaction strategy which combines a Lookup Table (LUT) mechanism and DMA mode, is proposed. In this strategy, a hardware message address table is created in the network interface (NI), and NI can transfer the data from the network to local memory directly by looking up this table. It can remarkably reduce the usage of CPU interruption during communication, which is significant to improve the communication performance. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy brings better performance than the traditional buffer pool strategy when the message size is big, and performs the same when the message size is small.