dAElite: A TDM NoC Supporting QoS, Multicast, and Fast Connection Set-Up

Networks-on-Chip (NoC) are seen as promising interconnect solutions, offering the advantages of scalability and high-frequency operation which the traditional bus interconnects lack. Several NoC implementations have been presented in the literature, some of them having mature tool-flows. The main differentiating factor between the various implementations is the set of services and communication patterns they offer to the end-user. In this paper we present dAElite, a TDM Network-on-Chip that offers a unique combination of features, namely, guaranteed bandwidth and latency per connection, built-in support for multicast, and a short connection set-up time. While our NoC was designed from the ground up, we leverage on existing tools for network dimensioning, analysis, and instantiation. We have implemented and tested our proposal in hardware and we compared it to Æthereal, a state-of-the-art NoC with similar features, but no multicast. We find that the connection set-up time is reduced by a factor of 10 and the network traversal latency is decreased by 33 percent. Moreover, considering realistic values of the network parameters, dAElite has a lower hardware area when synthesized in 65 nm technology.