Implementation of a scalable, globally plesiochronous locally synchronous, off-chip NoC communication protocol

Multiprocessor system-on-chip design (MPSoC) is becoming a regular feature of the embedded systems. Shared-bus systems hold many advantages, but they do not scale. Network on chip (NoC) offers a promising solution to the scalability problem by enhancing the topology design. However, standard NoCs are only scalable within a chip. To be able to build infinitely scalable structures, a method to enhance the NoC-grid off-chip is needed. In this paper, we present such a method. As a proof of concept, the protocol is implemented on a 4 by 4 Mesh NoC, with NIOS II CPU cores as nodes, partitioned across four separate Altera FPGA boards, each board hosting a Quad-Core (2×2) NoC, operating on a local 50 MHz clock. The inter-chip communication protocol uses asynchronous clock bridges, with a throughput of 50 Mbps (~lMFlit/s) and is completely scalable. The NoC has an onboard throughput of 650 Mbps (12.5 MFlit/s). Each Quad-Core uses 28% of the LUs, 18% of the ALUTs, 22 % of the dedicated registers and 31% of the total memory blocks of the Stratix II FPGAs. Application programs use an MPI compatible Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) to communicate with each other over the NoC.