A heuristic clustering approach to use case-aware application-specific network-on-chip synthesis

Network-on-chip (NoC) is a promising paradigm for efficient communication between the processing elements inside multi-core system-on-chip (SoC) and general purpose chip-multi-processor. Choosing appropriate topology for NoCs with predefined application characteristics plays a pivotal role in improving power and area metrics. Until now, different irregular topologies with varying objective optimization parameters have been offered. In this paper, a novel heuristic topology synthesis method for creating application-specific NoCs consisting of some use cases which are described the applications characteristics has been proposed. This approach is composed of application clustering for assigning cores to specific routers, topology construction for finding a routing path for all flows, and also link insertion for producing final topology by interconnecting the routers. To confirm the proposed method, results of an industrial smartphone SoC and some generic benchmarks have been used as case studies. Experimental results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art approaches.