The heterogenous nature and the demand for extensive parallel processing in modern applications have resulted in widespread use of Multicore System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. The emerging Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture provides an energy-efficient and scalable communication solution for Multicore SoCs, serving as a powerful replacement for traditional bus-based solutions. The key to successful realization of such architectures is a flexible, fast and robust emulation platform for fast design space exploration. In this research, we present the design and evaluation of a highly configurable NoC used in AcENoCs (Accelerated Emulation platform for NoCs), a flexible and cycle accurate field programmable gate array (FPGA) emulation platform for validating NoC architectures. Along with the implementation details, we also discuss the various design optimizations and tradeoffs, and assess the performance improvements of AcENoCs over existing simulators and emulators. We design a hardware library consisting of routers and links using verilog hardware description language (HDL). The router is parameterized and has a configurable number of physical ports, virtual channels (VCs) and pipeline depth. A packet switched NoC is constructed by connecting the routers in either 2D-Mesh or 2D-Torus topology. The NoC is integrated in the AcENoCs platform and prototyped on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. The NoC was evaluated under various synthetic and realistic workloads generated by AcENoCs' traffic generators implemented on the Xilinx MicroBlaze embedded processor. In order to validate the NoC design, performance metrics like average latency and throughput were measured and compared against the results obtained using standard network simulators. FPGA implementation of the NoC using Xilinx tools indicated a 76% LUT utilization for a 5x5 2D-Mesh network. A VC allocator was found to be the single largest consumer of hardware resources within a router. The router design synthesized at a frequency of 135MHz, 124MHz and 109MHz for 3-port, 4-port and 5-port configurations, respectively. The operational frequency of the router in the AcENoCs environment was limited only by the software execution latency even though the hardware itself could be clocked at a much higher rate. An AcENoCs emulator showed speedup improvements of 10000-12000X over HDL simulators and 5-15X over software simulators, without sacrificing cycle accuracy.

Network-on-Chip (NOC) based designs have garnered significant attention from both researchers and industry over the past several years. The analysis of these designs has focused on broad topics such as NOC component micro-architecture, fault-tolerant communication, and system memory architecture. Nonetheless, the design of lowlatency, high-bandwidth, low-power and area-efficient NOC is extremely complex due to the conflicting nature of these design objectives. Benchmarks are an indispensable tool in the design process; providing thorough measurement and fair comparison between designs in order to achieve optimal results (i.e performance, cost, quality of service). This research proposes a benchmarking platform called NoCBench for evaluating the performance of Network-on-chip. Although previous research has proposed standard guidelines to develop benchmarks for Network-on-Chip, this work moves forward and proposes a System-C based simulation platform for system-level design exploration. It will provide an initial set of synthetic benchmarks for on-chip network interconnection validation along with an initial set of standardized processing cores, NOC components, and system-wide services. The benchmarks were constructed using synthetic applications described by Task Graphs For Free (TGFF) task graphs extracted from the E3S benchmark suite. Two benchmarks were used for characterization: Consumer and Networking. They are characterized based on throughput and latency. Case studies show how they can be used to evaluate metrics beyond throughput and latency (i.e. traffic distribution). The contribution of this work is two-fold: 1) This study provides a methodology for benchmark creation and characterization using NoCBench that evaluates important metrics in NOC design (i.e. end-to-end packet delay, throughput). 2) The developed full-system simulation platform provides a complete environment for further benchmark characterization on NOC based MpSoC as well as system-level design space exploration.

The emergence of networks-on-chip (NoC) as the communication infrastructure solution for complex multi-core SoCs presents communication synthesis challenges. This dissertation addresses the design and run-time management aspects of communication synthesis. Design reuse and the infeasibility of Intellectual Property (IP) core interface redesign, requires the development of a Core-Network Interface (CNI) which allows them to communicate over the on-chip network. The absence of intelligence amongst the NoC components, entails the introduction of a CNI capable of not only providing basic packetization and depacketization, but also other essential services such as reliability, power management, reconguration and test support. A generic CNI architecture providing these services for NoCs is proposed and evaluated in this dissertation. Rising on-chip communication power costs and reliability concerns due to these, motivate the development of a peak power management technique that is both scalable to dierent NoCs and adaptable to varying trac congurations. A scalable and adaptable peak power management technique - SAPP - is proposed and demonstrated. Latency and throughput improvements observed with SAPP demonstrate its superiority over existing techniques. Increasing design complexity make prediction of design lifetimes dicult. Post SoC deployment, an on-line health monitoring scheme, is essential to maintain con- dence in the correct operation of on-chip cores. The rising design complexity and IP core test costs makes non-concurrent testing of the IP cores infeasible. An on-line scheme capable of managing IP core test in the presence of executing applications is essential. Such a scheme ensures application performance and system power budgets are eciently managed. This dissertation proposes Concurrent On-Line Test (COLT) for NoC-based systems and demonstrates how a robust implementation of COLT using a Test Infrastructure-IP (TI-IP) can be used to maintain condence in the correct operation of the SoC.

As the feature size scales down to deep nanometer regimes, it has enabled the designers to fabricate chips with billions of transistors. The availability of such abundant computational resources on a single chip has made it possible to design chips with multiple computational cores, resulting in the inception of Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs). The widespread use of CMPs has resulted in a paradigm shift from computation-centric architectures to communication-centric architectures. With the continuous increase in the number of cores that can be fabricated on a single chip, communication between the cores has become a crucial factor in its overall performance. Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm has evolved into a standard on-chip interconnection network that can efficiently handle the strict communication requirements between the cores on a chip. The components of an NoC include routers, that facilitate routing of data between multiple cores and links that provide raw bandwidth for data traversal. While diminishing feature size has made it possible to integrate billions of transistors on a chip, the advantage of multiple cores has been marred with the waning reliability of transistors. Components of an NoC are not immune to the increasing number of hard faults and soft errors emanating due to extreme miniaturization of transistor sizes. Faults in an NoC result in significant ramifications such as isolation of healthy cores, deadlock, data corruption, packet loss and increased packet latency, all of which have a severe impact on the performance of a chip. This has stimulated the need to design resilient and fault tolerant NoCs. This thesis handles the issue of fault tolerance in NoC routers. Within the NoC router, the focus is specifically on the router pipeline that is responsible for the smooth flow of packets. In this thesis we propose two different fault tolerant architectures that can continue to operate in the presence of faults. In addition to these two architectures, we also propose a new reliability metric for evaluating soft error tolerant techniques targeted towards the control logic of the NoC router pipeline. First, we present Shield, a fault tolerant NoC router architecture that is capable of handling both hard faults and soft errors in its pipeline. Shield uses techniques such as spatial redundancy, exploitation of idle resources and bypassing a faulty resource to achieve hard fault tolerance. The use of these techniques reveals that Shield is six times more reliable than baseline-unprotected router. To handle soft errors, Shield uses selective hardening technique that includes hardening specific gates of the router pipeline to increase its soft error tolerance. To quantify soft error tolerance improvement, we propose a new metric called Soft Error Improvement Factor (SEIF) and use it to show that Shield’s soft error tolerance is three times better than that of the baseline-unprotected router. Then, we present Soft Error Tolerant NoC Router (STNR), a low overhead fault tolerating NoC router architecture that can tolerate soft errors in the control logic of its pipeline. STNR achieves soft error tolerance based on the idea of dual execution, comparison and rollback. It exploits idle cycles in the router pipeline to perform redundant computation and comparison necessary for soft error detection. Upon the detection of a soft error, the pipeline is rolled back to the stage that got affected by the soft error. Salient features of STNR include high level of soft error detection, fault containment and minimum impact on latency. Simulations show that STNR has been able to detect all injected single soft errors in the router pipeline. To perform a quantitative comparison between STNR and other existing similar architectures, we propose a new reliability metric called Metric for Soft error Tolerance (MST) in this thesis. MST is unique in the aspect that it encompasses four crucial factors namely, soft error tolerance, area overhead, power overhead and pipeline latency overhead into a single metric. Analysis using MST shows that STNR provides better reliability while incurring low overhead compared to existing architectures.

Decisions regarding the mapping of system-on-chip (SoC) components onto a NoC become more difficult with increasing complexity of system design. These complex systems capable of providing multiple functionalities tend to operate in multiple modes of operation. Modeling the system communication in these multimodes aids in efficient system design. This research provides a heuristic that gives a flexible mapping solution of the multimode system communications onto the NoC topology of choice. The solution specifies the immediate neighbors of the SoC components and the routes taken by all communications in the system. We validate the mapping results with a network-on-chip simulator (NoCSim). This thesis also investigates the cost associated with the interfacing of the components to the NoC. With the goal of reducing communication latency, we examine the packetization strategies in the NoC communication. Three schemes of implementations were analyzed, and the costs in terms of latency, and area were projected through actual synthesis.

In this dissertation, I explore energy and reliability in future NoC (Network-on-Chip) interconnected CMPs (chip multiprocessors) as they have become a first-order constraint in future CMP design. In the first part, we target the root cause of network energy consumption through techniques that reduce link and router-level switching activity. We specifically focus on memory subsystem traffic, as it comprises the bulk of NoC load in a CMP. By transmitting only the flits that contain words that we predicted would be useful using a novel spatial locality predictor, our scheme seeks to reduce network activity. We aim to further lower NoC energy consumption through microarchitectural mechanisms that inhibit datapath switching activity caused by unused words in individual flits. Using simulation-based performance studies and detailed energy models based on synthesized router designs and different link wire types, we show that (a) the pre- diction mechanism achieves very high accuracy, with an average rate of false-unused prediction of just 2.5%; (b) the combined NoC energy savings enabled by the predictor and microarchitectural support are 36% on average and up to 57% in the best case; and (c) there is no system performance penalty as a result of this technique. In the second part, we present a method for dynamic voltage/frequency scaling of networks-on-chip and last level caches in CMP designs, where the shared resources form a single voltage/frequency domain. We develop a new technique for monitoring and control and validate it by running PARSEC benchmarks through full system simulations. These techniques reduce energy-delay product by 46% compared to a state-of-the-art prior work. In the third part, we develop critical path models for HCI- and NBTI-induced wear assuming stress caused under realistic workload conditions, and apply them onto the interconnect microarchitecture. A key finding from this modeling is that, counter to prevailing wisdom, wearout in the CMP on-chip interconnect is correlated with a lack of load observed in the NoC routers, rather than high load. We then develop a novel wearout-decelerating scheme in which routers under low load have their wearout-sensitive components exercised without significantly impacting the router’s cycle time, pipeline depth, and area or power consumption. We subsequently show that the proposed design yields a 13.8∼65× increase in CMP lifetime.

With increased density of modern System on Chip(SoC) communication between nodes has become a major problem. Network on Chip is a novel on chip communication paradigm to solve this by using highly scalable and efficient packet switched network. The addition of intelligent networking on the chip adds to the chip’s power consumption thus making management of communication power an interesting and challenging research problem. While VLSI techniques have evolved over time to enable power reduction in the circuit level, the highly dynamic nature of modern large SoC demand more than that. This dissertation explores some innovative dynamic solutions to manage the ever increasing communication power in the post sub-micron era. Today’s highly integrated SoCs require great level of cross layer optimizations to provide maximum efficiency. This dissertation aims at the dynamic power management problem from top. Starting with a system level distribution and management down to microarchitecture enhancements were found necessary to deliver maximum power efficiency. A distributed power budget sharing technique is proposed. To efficiently satisfy the established power budget, a novel flow control and throttling technique is proposed. Finally power efficiency of underlying microarchitecture is explored and novel buffer and link management techniques are developed. All of the proposed techniques yield improvement in power-performance efficiency of the NoC infrastructure.

Les progrès dans le domaine des semi-conducteurs ont permis la miniaturisation des puces et l’extension considérable de leurs capacités de calcul et de mémorisation. Cela s’est accompagné d’un accroissement très important du volume des données échangées à l’intérieur de ces puces, limitant les performances au débit de données dans la puce. Ainsi, les concepteurs ont proposé le réseau sur puce (ou NoC : Network-on-Chip) afin de répondre à ces besoins. Cependant, l’accroissement du trafic permis par ce réseau se traduit par une consommation énergétique plus importante engendrant une hausse de la température et une diminution de la fiabilité de la puce. L’élaboration de techniques d’optimisation de l’énergie du NoC est alors nécessaire. La première partie de cette thèse est consacrée à l’étude de la modélisation des NoCs afin d’estimer leur consommation et d’identifier les composants les plus consommateurs. Ainsi, la première contribution de cette thèse a été d’améliorer la modélisation du NoC en modifiant le modèle d’interconnexions d’un simulateur de NoC existant (Noxim), pour le rendre bit-près (Noxim-XT), et ainsi permettre au simulateur d’incorporer un modèle d’interconnexions considérant les effets du crosstalk, phénomène physique faisant varier leur consommation d’énergie. La seconde partie de la thèse traite de l’optimisation de la consommation d’énergie du NoC. Ainsi, la recherche d’optimisation s’est orientée vers la réduction d’énergie des liens étant donné leur importante contribution énergétique dans la consommation d’énergie dynamique du réseau. De plus, la part de l’énergie dynamique tend à augmenter avec l’évolution de la technologie. Nous avons proposé à l’issue de cette étude deux techniques d’optimisation pour les interconnexions du NoC. Ces deux optimisations proposent des compromis énergie / latence différents et une extension possible de ces travaux pourrait être la mise en oeuvre de la sélection de l’optimisation selon les besoins de l’application en cours. / Thanks to the technology’s shrinking, a considerable amount of memory and computing capacity can be embedded into a single chip. This improvement leads to an important increase of the bandwidth requirements, that becomes the bottleneck of chip performances in terms of computational power. Thus, designers proposed the Network-on-Chip (NoC) as an answer to this bandwidth challenge. However, the on-chip traffic growth allowed by the NoC causes a significant rise of the chip energy consumption, which leads to a temperature increase and a reliability reduction of the chip. The development of energy optimization techniques for NoC becomes necessary.The first part of this thesis is devoted to the study of NoCs power models in order to estimate accurately the consumption of each component. Then, we can identify which ones are the most power consuming. Hence, the first contribution of this thesis has been to improve the NoC power model by replacing the lilnk power model in a NoC simulator (Noxim) by a bit-accurate one (Noxim-XT). In this way, the simulator is able to consider Crosstalk effects, a physical phenomenon that increases links energy consumption. The second part of the thesis deals with NoC energy optimization techniques. Thus, our research of optimization techniques is focused on inter-router links since their energy contribution regarding the NoC dynamic energy is significant and the dynamic energy tends to stay prominent with the shrinking technology. We proposed two optimization techniques from the study of NoC links optimizations. These two techniques present different energy / latency compromises and a possible extension of this work could be the development of a transmission strategy in order to select the right technique according to the application requirements.

Network on chips (NoCs) have emerged as a panacea to solve many intercommunication issues that are imposed by the fast growing of VLSI design. NOC have been deployed as a solution for the communication delay between cores, area overhead, power consumption, etc. One of the leading parameters of speeding up the performance of system on chips (SOCs) is the efficiency of scheduling algorithms for the applications running on a SOC. In this thesis we are arguing that a global scheduling view can significantly improve latency in NoCs. This view can be achieved by having the NoC nodes communicate with each other in a predefined application-based fashion; by calculating in advance how many clock cycles the nodes need to execute and transmit packets to the network and how many clock cycles are needed for the packets to travel all the way to the destination through routers (including queuing delay). By knowing that, we could keep some of the cores stay in "Hold-On" state until the right time comes to start transmitting. This technique could lead to reduced congestion and it may guarantee that the cores do not suffer from severe resource contention, e.g. accessing memory. This task is achieved by using a network simulator (such as OPNET) and gathering statistics, so the worst case latency can be determined. Therefore, if NoC nodes can somehow postpone sending packets in a way that does not violate the deadline of their tasks, packet dropping or livelock can be avoided. It is assumed that the NoC nodes here need buffers of their own in order to hold the ready-to-transmit packets and this can be the cost of this approach.

abstract: In recent years we have witnessed a shift towards multi-processor system-on-chips (MPSoCs) to address the demands of embedded devices (such as cell phones, GPS devices, luxury car features, etc.). Highly optimized MPSoCs are well-suited to tackle the complex application demands desired by the end user customer. These MPSoCs incorporate a constellation of heterogeneous processing elements (PEs) (general purpose PEs and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICS)). A typical MPSoC will be composed of a application processor, such as an ARM Coretex-A9 with cache coherent memory hierarchy, and several application sub-systems. Each of these sub-systems are composed of highly optimized instruction processors, graphics/DSP processors, and custom hardware accelerators. Typically, these sub-systems utilize scratchpad memories (SPM) rather than support cache coherency. The overall architecture is an integration of the various sub-systems through a high bandwidth system-level interconnect (such as a Network-on-Chip (NoC)). The shift to MPSoCs has been fueled by three major factors: demand for high performance, the use of component libraries, and short design turn around time. As customers continue to desire more and more complex applications on their embedded devices the performance demand for these devices continues to increase. Designers have turned to using MPSoCs to address this demand. By using pre-made IP libraries designers can quickly piece together a MPSoC that will meet the application demands of the end user with minimal time spent designing new hardware. Additionally, the use of MPSoCs allows designers to generate new devices very quickly and thus reducing the time to market. In this work, a complete MPSoC synthesis design flow is presented. We first present a technique \cite{leary1_intro} to address the synthesis of the interconnect architecture (particularly Network-on-Chip (NoC)). We then address the synthesis of the memory architecture of a MPSoC sub-system \cite{leary2_intro}. Lastly, we present a co-synthesis technique to generate the functional and memory architectures simultaneously. The validity and quality of each synthesis technique is demonstrated through extensive experimentation. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Computer Science 2013