An area-efficient TDM NoC supporting reconfiguration for mode changes

This paper presents an area-efficient time-division-multiplexing (TDM) network-on-chip (NoC) intended for use in a multicore platform for hard real-time systems. In such a platform, a mode change at the application level requires the tear-down and set-up of some virtual circuits without affecting the virtual circuits that persist across the mode change. Our NoC supports such reconfiguration in a very efficient way, using the same resources that are used for transmission of regular data. We evaluate the presented NoC in terms of worst-case reconfiguration time, hardware cost, and maximum operating frequency. The results show that the hardware cost for an FPGA implementation of our architecture is a factor of 2.2 to 3.9 times smaller than other NoCs with reconfiguration functionalities, and that the worst-case time for a reconfiguration is shorter or comparable to those NoCs.