Multi-purpose System-on-Chip platform for rapid prototyping

This paper shows a multi-purpose System-on-Chip (SoC) platform for rapid prototyping of computation and data intensive applications. The platform is composed of an Intellectual property (IP) modules resource library, a 2D mesh Network-on-Chip (NoC) as communication infrastructure which scales to an arbitrary number of resources, avoiding bus-based communication. A general scheme to plug any IP resource into the network and build a full system is described. Hardware and software design is illustrated by means of a case study comprising a heterogeneous implementation with different kinds of resources for different tasks. The case study shows how this approach favors the reuse of components and applications, reduces design time, and yields to a relatively low-cost implementation of heterogeneous systems.