Outstanding Research Problems in NoC Design: System, Microarchitecture, and Circuit Perspectives

TLDR

Network‑on‑chip (NoC) architectures have been proposed to replace global interconnects and alleviate complex communication problems arising from increasing on‑chip components. The paper aims to describe NoC architectures and applications, then analyze interactions among research problems to frame the NoC design process. The authors provide a general overview of NoC architectures, enumerate research problems across five categories, and discuss motivation, problem descriptions, proposed approaches, and open issues from system, microarchitecture, and circuit perspectives.

Abstract

To alleviate the complex communication problems that arise as the number of on-chip components increases, network-on-chip (NoC) architectures have been recently proposed to replace global interconnects. In this paper, we first provide a general description of NoC architectures and applications. Then, we enumerate several related research problems organized under five main categories: Application characterization, communication paradigm, communication infrastructure, analysis, and solution evaluation. Motivation, problem description, proposed approaches, and open issues are discussed for each problem from system, microarchitecture, and circuit perspectives. Finally, we address the interactions among these research problems and put the NoC design process into perspective.