A Programming Model and a NoC-Based Architecture for Streaming Applications

The ever increasing density of integration makes the NoC a relevant communication design paradigm even for FPGAs. But NoC are always designed without considerations of applications and programming models, like busses and crossbars. Dealing with parallelism is still challenging. One way is to take into account the parallel programming model and application field in the design of the NoC, to reduce the semantic gap between application and implementation. In this paper we present a NoC and a design flow which target the implementation of streaming applications, e.g. image and video processing. The NoC topology is described as a matrix of routers (maybe a sparse matrix) mapped on a matrix of FPGAs for prototyping, which brings up a hierarchical dimension. Besides, the NoC has been developed in conjunction with a streaming programming model expressed with a subset of System C language. This allows optimizing the NoC by implementing the communication and synchronization primitives'mechanisms of the programming model directly in hardware: the size of such a router connected to 4 processing elements is about 2000 CLB from Xilinx FPGA, which is comparable with the size of a single processor. The design flow automates the implementation of an application expressed with a System C subset to a NoC based architecture.