RedScarf: A User-Friendly Multi-Platform Network-on-Chip Simulator

The design space exploration of Networks-on-Chip (NoC) requires tools to evaluate the network performance, tune its parameters and achieve the requirements of the target application. In this context, this paper presents RedScarf, a simulation environment with graphical user interface and a set of tools that automate the design space exploration of NoCs. It presents many resources that make RedScarf a powerful tool for Research and Education on NoCs. RedScarf is user friendly, platform-independent and offers a diversity of topologies and communication mechanisms, thus covering the main on-chip interconnect architectures described in the literature. Experimental results demonstrate how the tool is useful for performance analysis of on-chip interconnect architectures.