Hierarchical Network-on-Chip for Embedded Many-Core Architectures

The need for computing power drastically increases and one good solution is to use many-core architectures. Besides, complex embedded applications become data-dependent and their execution time depends on their input data. For this reason, on-line task and data allocation is needed to optimize the architecture efficiency. Moreover, communications are a complex problem in many-core architectures. Because of dynamic allocation, communication paths and network loads become unpredictable, which must be handled by the network. This paper proposes an evaluation of different network topologies in terms of performance and area for many-core architectures. It concludes that hierarchical networks are the best trade-off. In particular, the MultiCross topology is 10 times more efficient than the mesh topology.