Memory-aware NoC Exploration and Design

In the past decade, tremendous progress has been made in NoC research, spanning architectures, protocols and tools. In addition to a large number of academic and research projects, we are now seeing several commercial realizations of NoC- based chip designs. With chip capacities going well beyond the billion transistor mark, on one hand large amounts of the die are occupied by memory resources and on the other hand many complex applications being mapped to these chips are also memory-intensive. In such instances, memories dominate all the axes of traditional design constraints, including, but not limited to performance, area (cost), and power/energy. Furthermore, the move towards sub-nanometer technologies elevates another critical design consideration: process variability and thermal sensitivity, which in turn critically affect the reliability of memories as well. All of these trends make the case for a memory-aware NoC design methodology.