A light-weight Network-on-Chip architecture for dynamically reconfigurable systems

On-chip communication design is a complex task, since the communication requirements and the complexity of the target application are high. With the introduction of dynamic reconfiguration (a feature than can be found, for instance, in recent Field Programmable Gate Arrays), the design of a reconfigurable communication infrastructure becomes a suitable approach to increase both the flexibility and the adaptability of such a system. These are two of the key features of a communication infrastructure for reconfigurable systems, since usually the designer is not aware of which will be the executing modules and the communication requirements at run-time. This paper introduces and describes a novel reconfigurable communication infrastructure for dynamically reconfigurable architectures. The proposed approach is a tile-based network-on-chip in which the communication layer is completely decoupled from the computational one. The proposed approach is designed to support dynamic reconfiguration at the communication fabrics level.