System-level application-specific NoC design for network and multimedia applications

Nowadays, embedded consumer devices execute complex network and multimedia applications that require high performance and low energy consumption. For implementing complex applications on Network-on-Chips (NoCs), a design methodology is needed for performing exploration at NoC system-level, in order to select the optimal application-specific NoC architecture. The design methodology we present in this paper is based on the exploration of different NoC characteristics and is supported by a flexible NoC simulator which provides the essential evaluation metrics in order to select optimal communication parameters of the NoC architectures. We show that it is possible with the evaluation metrics provided by the simulator we present, to perform exploration of several NoC aspects and select the optimal communication characteristics for NoC platforms implementing network and multimedia applications.