Delay analysis of wormhole based heterogeneous NoC

We introduce a novel evaluation methodology to analyze the delay of a wormhole routing based NoC with variable link capacities and a variable number of virtual channels per link. This methodology can be utilized to analyze different heterogeneous NoC architectures and traffic scenarios for which no analysis framework has been developed before. In particular, it can replace computationally-extensive simulations at the inner-loop of the link capacities and virtual channels allocation steps of the NoC topology optimization process. Our analysis introduces a set of implicit equations which can be efficiently solved iteratively. We demonstrate the accuracy of our approximation by comparing the analysis results to a simulation model for several use-cases and synthetic examples. In addition, we compare the analysis with simulation results for a chip-multi-processor (CMP) using SPLASH-2 and PARSEC traces for both homogeneous and heterogeneous NoC configurations.