Network-on-Multi-Chip (NoMC) for Multi-FPGA Multimedia Systems

Some applications, especially in the area of multimedia processing, need to be implemented in a multichip platform, due to their size. An efficient communication infrastructure for such systems may be designed with the use of the Networks-on-Chip (NoCs). However, a network for multi-chip systems require a scalable architecture. Moreover, for multimedia purposes, such NoC should support a multicast transmission mode. In order to meet this requirements, we propose the NoMC (Network-on-Multi-Chip) which is a hierarchical interconnect system, designed for multi-chip systems. A performance of the proposed network is assessed utilizing a model of the MVC (Multiview Video Coding) coder. In such system, the multicast transmission mode may yield an overall bandwidth gain up to 30%. Moreover, the synthesis results show that the proposed network elements are easily synthesizable for the FPGA devices.