Network On Chip - Benefits of Adopting NoCs

Benefits of Adopting NoCs

Traditionally, ICs have been designed with dedicated point-to-point connections, with one wire dedicated to each signal. For large designs, in particular, this has several limitations from a physical design viewpoint. The wires occupy much of the area of the chip, and in nanometer CMOS technology, interconnects dominate both performance and dynamic power dissipation, as signal propagation in wires across the chip requires multiple clock cycles. (See Rent's rule for a discussion of wiring requirements for point-to-point connections).

NoC links can reduce the complexity of designing wires for predictable speed, power, noise, reliability, etc., thanks to their regular, well controlled structure. From a system design viewpoint, with the advent of multi-core processor systems, a network is a natural architectural choice. A NoC can provide separation between computation and communication, support modularity and IP reuse via standard interfaces, handle synchronization issues, serve as a platform for system test, and, hence, increase engineering productivity.