Floorplanning and topology synthesis for application-specific network-on-chips

Application-Specific Network-on-Chips (ASNoCs) have been proposed as a more promising solution than regular NoCs to the global communication challenges for particular applications in nanoscale Systemon- Chip (SoC) designs. In ASNoC Design, one of the key challenges is to generate the most suitable and power efficient NoC topology under the constraints of the application specification. In this work, we present a two-step floorplanning (TSF) algorithm, integrating topology synthesis into floorplanning phase, to automate the synthesis of such ASNoC topologies. At the first-step floorplanning, during the simulated annealing, we explore the optimal positions and clustering of cores and implement an incremental path allocation algorithm to predictively evaluate the power consumption of the generated NoC topology. At the second-step floorplanning, we explore the optimal positions of switches and network interfaces on the floorplan. A power and timing aware path allocation algorithm is also integrated into this step to determine the connectivity across different switches. Experimental results on a variety of benchmarks show that our algorithm can produce greatly improved solutions over the latest works.