A modular simulation framework for architectural exploration of on-chip interconnection networks

Ever increasing complexity and heterogeneity of SoC platforms require on-chip communication schemes beyond the currently omnipresent shared bus architectures. To prevent time consuming design changes late in the design flow, we propose the early exploration of the on-chip communication architecture to meet performance and cost requirements. Based on SystemC 2.0.1 we have defined a modular exploration framework, which is able to capture the effect on performance for different on-chip networks like dedicated point-to-point, shared bus, and crossbar topologies. Monitoring of performance parameters like utilization, latency and throughput drives the mapping of the intermodule traffic to an efficient communication architecture. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by the exemplary design of a high performance Network Processing Unit (NPU), which is compared against a commercial NPU device.