Network-on-chip with guaranteed-bandwidth data communication service

A network-on-chip (NoC), having guaranteed-throughput (GT) or guaranteed bandwidth service by using a flexible method to establish a connection-oriented data communication at runtime, is presented in this paper. The GT packets can share communication link with a flexible manner, where flits belonging to the same packet will have the same local identity-tag (ID-tag). The ID-tags of each packet will vary locally along communication links, and are organized with an ID-tag mapping management unit, which is implemented at each output part of the on-chip routers. There is no need for a specific algorithm for finding a conflict-free scheduling as commonly used in the TDM-based methods that use time slots allocation technique. The contention problem is solved with the hardware solution based on the locally organized message identity (ID). This guaranteed bandwidth/throughput service will provide a good interconnect platform for many core processor systems running computer vision and multimedia applications with better performance.