Design space exploration and prototyping for on-chip multimedia applications

Traditionally, design space exploration for systems-on-chip (SoCs) has focused on the computational aspects of the problem at hand. However, as the number of components on a single chip and their performance continue to increase, a shift from computation-bound to communication-bound design becomes mandatory. Towards this end, this paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of two communication architectures targeting multimedia applications. Specifically, we compare and contrast the network-on-chip (NoC) and point-to-point (P2P) communication architectures in terms of power, performance, and area. As the main contribution, we present complete P2P and NoC-based implementations of a real multimedia application (MPEG-2 encoder), and provide direct measurements using a FPGA prototype and actual video clips, rather than simulation and synthetic workload. From an experimental standpoint, we show that the NoC architecture scales very well in terms of area, performance, power and design effort, while the P2P architecture scales poorly on all accounts except performance.