Survey of Network-on-Chip (NoC) for Heterogeneous Multicore Systems

In recent years, Network-on-Chip (NoC) has emerged as a promising solution for addressing a critical performance bottleneck encountered in designing large-scale multi-core systems, i.e., data communication. With advancements in chip manufacturing technologies and the increasing complexity of system designs, the task of designing the communication subsystems has become increasingly challenging. The emergence of hardware accelerators, such as GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs, together with heterogeneous system integration of the CPUs and the accelerators creates new challenges in NoC design. Conventional NoC architectures developed for CPU-based multi-core systems are not able to satisfy the traffic demands of heterogeneous systems. In recent years, numerous research efforts have been dedicated to exploring the various aspects of NoC design in hardware accelerators and heterogeneous systems. However, there is a need for a comprehensive understanding of the current state-of-the-art research in this emerging research area. This paper aims to provide a summary of research work conducted in heterogeneous NoC design. Through this survey, we aim to present a comprehensive overview of the current related research, highlighting key findings, challenges, and future directions in this field.