RASoC: a router soft-core for networks-on-chip

The building block of a network-on-chip (NoCs) is its router. It is responsible to switch the channels which forward the messages exchanged by the cores attached to the NoC, and the costs and performance of the NoC strongly depends on the router architecture. In this paper, we present RASoC, a router architecture intended to be used in the building of low area overhead NoCs for embedded systems. The difference among RASoC and current routers relies on its implementation as a parameterized VHDL model, which improve the reuse of RASoC in the synthesis of NoCs with different sizes, and allows the tuning of the NoC parameters in order to meet the requirements of the target application. The paper presents details of RASoC architecture, the structure of the VHDL model and some experimental results which show the scalability of the soft-core and its costs.