Design of a Dual-Mode NoC Router Integrated with Network Interface for AMBA-based IPs

Networks-on-a-chip (NoC) is a new architectural template, which helps to meet many of challenges of designing a complex system-on-a-chip (SoC). In the paper, we introduce the on-chip network of and propose the dual-mode router for NoC which provides both guaranteed and best-effort communication services. We adopt the recording table for circuit switching to support the guaranteed service, and in order to sufficiently utilize the bandwidth of the network we add the wormhole switching which contains several virtual channels. Additionally, our router integrates the standard interface with AMBA AHB for easier integration of the intellectual properties (IPs) of NoC. The benchmark router with 5 32-bit ports can operate at 100 MHz and the bandwidth per link of the router can be up to 3.2 Gbps. The performance of the router is enough for providing an HDTV application on NoC.