NI + router microarchitecture for NoC-based communication systems

Modern communication systems are characterized by intensive computation signal processing algorithms. System-on-Chip implementations of these systems are generally based on Networks-on-Chip (NoC). The router and Network Interface (NI) are the main elements of the NoC, but the router is the architecture most discussed in the literature. Here, a NI + router microarchitecture is presented. Our router implementation outperforms the previous work in operational frequency by a 20%. The NI usually is assumed as a simple wrapper, although results in this work show that the NI can consume almost twice resources than the router. This indicates that further discussions must be carried out for the design of NoC-based communication systems.