ABSTRACT
The introduction of on-chip networks in system-on-chip (SoC) design is an evolution of bus interconnects technology. This chapter focuses on the upcoming technology trends and the needs of NoC in designing many-core-based SoCs. For boosting up the performance of chip multiprocessing-based systems, researchers have adopted SoC platform to build a general-purpose multiprocessor SoC for supporting a wide range of applications. The chapter describes different horizons of research in the field of NoC design. Important hardware aspect in designing a complete NoC is the integration of cores with the routers. The chapter explores a set of NoCs that has been designed till date from the industry and academia. The major research problems in NoC design can be broadly classified into four different dimensions—communication infrastructure, communication paradigm, evaluation framework, and application mapping—as addressed in the works of Ogras et al. and Marculescu et al. Several research groups from academia and industry have implemented NoC to support MPSoC platform.
