Application mapping algorithms for mesh-based network-on-chip architectures

Due to shrinking technology sizes, more and more processing elements and memory blocks are being integrated on a single die. However, traditional communication infrastructures (e.g., bus or point-to-point) cannot handle the synchronization problems of these large systems. Using network-on-chip (NoC) is a step towards solving this communication problem. Energy- and communication-efficient application mapping is a previously studied problem for mesh-based NoC architectures; however, there is still need for intelligent mapping algorithms since current algorithms either take too much running time or do not determine accurate results. To fill this need, in this study, we propose two mapping algorithms (one based on simulated annealing and one based on genetic algorithm) for energy- and communication-aware mapping problems of mesh-based NoC architectures. We compare these two algorithms with an integer linear programming-based method and a heuristic method using several multimedia and synthetic benchmarks.