Industry Expert Blogs

The Network On Chip (NoC) concept is recent, about 10 years old, and the first implementation of commercially available NoC IP has happened in 2006. Should we drop the concept so quickly after it has been introduced? In fact, I don’t think so… But we could brain storm and imagine the new functions that could be implemented within or around the NoC, benefiting from the existing NoC architecture. Ever increasing SoC complexity generates needs for new functionalities, like error correction and resiliency to increase data robustness, software observability or cache coherency and distributed virtual memory in multi CPU SoC. The NoC provides a ready to use infrastructure (the physical links where to move data), packet based communication protocol (logical way to transport data), so why not using existing NoC physical and logical architecture and go “Beyond the NoC”: implement various serviced functionalities, opportunistically using the NoC to save real estate, power consumption and design resource?

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