Abstract
Traditionally, design-space exploration for systems-on-chip (SoCs) has focused on the computational aspects of the problem at hand. However, as the number of components on a single chip and their performance continue to increase, a shift from computation-based to communication-based design becomes mandatory. As a result, the communication architecture plays a major role in the area, performance, and energy consumption of the overall system. This article presents a comprehensive evaluation of three on-chip communication architectures targeting multimedia applications. Specifically, we compare and contrast the network-on-chip (NoC) with point-to-point (P2P) and bus-based communication architectures in terms of area, performance, and energy consumption. As the main contribution, we present complete P2P, bus-, and NoC-based implementations of a real multimedia application (i. e. the MPEG-2 encoder), and provide direct measurements using an FPGA prototype and actual video clips, rather than simulation and synthetic workloads. We also support the experimental findings through a theoretical analysis. Both experimental and analysis results show that the NoC architecture scales very well in terms of area, performance, energy, and design effort, while the P2P and bus-based architectures scale poorly on all accounts except for performance and area, respectively.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 1255460 |
Journal | ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems |
Volume | 12 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 1 2007 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- FPGA prototype
- MPEG-2 encoder
- Networks-on-chip
- Point-to-point
- System-on-chip
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Computer Science Applications
- Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering