Synergistic Floorplanning and Routing Topology Co-design for Application-Specific NoC Synthesis

Network-on-Chip (NoC) offers a promising solution for on-chip communication in highly integrated System-on-Chips (SoCs). NoCs can be designed with either regular or application-specific network topologies. While regular topologies are easy to design, they are not ideal for systems with heterogeneous processing elements (PEs) that vary in size. The design of application-specific NoCs, however, involves several interrelated problems that impact each other. This work addresses the challenges in the synthesis of application-specific NoCs by proposing an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) framework. This framework enables the co-design of major problems, including floorplanning, routing topology generation, routing path construction, and application mapping. Although the ILP framework can be applied to each problem individually or in a stepwise manner, the co-design of these interconnected problems allows synthesis steps to interact, enabling designers to explore the entire design space. Using this framework, we have analyzed various design configurations in the synthesis of application-specific NoCs.