• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.11
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• pp.83-93
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• 2014

It is a widespread concern that electrical interconnection based network-on-chip (NoC) will ultimately face the limitation in communication bandwidth, transmission latency and power consumption in the near future. With the development of silicon photonics technology, a hybrid optical network-on-chip (HONoC) which embraces both electrical- and optical interconnect, is emerging as a promising solution to overcome these problems. Today's leading edge systems-on-chips (SoCs) comprise heterogeneous many-cores for higher energy efficiency, therefore, extended study beyond regular topology based NoC is required. This paper proposes an energy and latency optimization topology design technique for HONoC taking into account the traffic characteristics of target applications. The proposed technique is implemented with genetic algorithm and simulation results show the reduction by 13.84% in power loss and 28.14% in average latency, respectively.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.86-94
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• 2007

The NoC (network-on-chip) approach is a promising solution to the increasing complexity of on-chip communication problems because of its high scalability. But, NoC applications generally consume a lot of power, because they require a large design space to accommodate many parallel IPs and network communication channels. It is not easy to analyze the power consumption of NoC applications with conventional simulation methods using simple power models. In addition, there are also many limitations in using sophisticated simulation models because they require long execution time and large efforts. In this paper, we apply a cycle-accurate energy measurement technique and tool to the FPGA prototypes, which are generally used to verify the correctness of SoC designs, as a practical indication of the power consumption of real NoC applications. An NoC-based JPEG encoder implementation is used as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.832-841
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• 2016

The voltage-frequency island (VFI) design paradigm has strong potential for achieving high energy efficiency in communication centric manycore system-on-chip (SoC) design called network-on-chip (NoC). However, because of the diminished scaling of wire-dimension and supply voltage as well as threshold voltage in modern CMOS technology, the vulnerability to link failure in VFI NoC is becoming a crucial challenge. In this paper, we propose an energy-optimized topology generation technique for VFI NoC to cope with permanent link failures. Based on the energy consumption model, we exploit the on-chip communication traffic patterns and characteristics of link failures in the early design stage to accommodate diverse applications and architectures. Experimental results using a number of multimedia application benchmarks show the effectiveness of the proposed three-step custom topology generation method in terms of energy consumption and latency without any degradation in the fault coverage metric.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.9
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• pp.465-474
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• 2005

For high density SoC design, on-chip communication based on bus interconnection encounters bandwidth limitation while an NoC(Network-on-Chip) approach suffers from unacceptable complexity in its Implementation. This paper introduces a new on-chip communication protocol, SNP (SoC Network Protocol) to overcome these problems. In SNP, conventional on-chip bus signals are categorized into three groups, control, address, and data and only one set of wires is used to transmit all three groups of signals, resulting in the dramatic decrease of the number of wires. SNP efficiently supports master-master communication as well as master-slave communication with symmetric channels. A sequencing rule of signal groups is defined as a part of SNP specification and a phase-restoration feature is proposed to avoid redundant signals transmitted repeatedly over back-to-back transactions. Simulation results show that SNP provides about the same bandwidth with only $54\%$ of wires when compared with AMBA AHB.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.44 no.8
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• pp.80-88
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• 2007

High adaptability and scalability are two critical issues in implementing a very complex system in a single chip. To obtain high adaptability and scalability, novel system design methodology known as communication-based system design has gained large attention from SoC designers. NoC (Network-on-Chip) is such an on-chip communication-based design approach for the next generation SoC design. To provide high adaptability and scalability, NoCs employ network interfaces and routers as their main communication structures and transmit and receive packetized data over such structures. However, data packetization, and routing overhead in terms of run time and area may cost too much compared with conventional SoC communication structure. Therefore, in this research, we propose a novel methodology which automatically generates a hybrid communication structure. In this work, we map traditional pin-to-pin wiring structure for frequent and timing critical communication, and map flexible and scalable structure for infrequent, or highly variable communication patterns. Even though, we simplify the communication structure significantly through our algorithm the connectivity or the scalability of the communication modules are almost maintained as the original NoC design. Using this method, we could improve the timing performance by 49.19%, and the area taken by the communication structure has been reduced by 24.03%.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.117-123
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a novel ant colony optimization(ACO)-based application core ma ins method for implementing network-on-chip(NoC)-based systems-on-chip(SoCs). The proposed method efficiently put application cores to a mesh-type NoC satisfying a given design objective, the network latency. Experimental results using a functional circuit including 12 cores show that the proposed algorithm can produce near optimal mapping results within a second.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.8B
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• pp.812-821
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• 2009

This paper proposes a novel dynamically reconfigurable switch for various multimedia applications in hybrid NoC systems. Current NoC systems, which adopt hybrid NoC structure with fixed switch and job distribution algorithms, require designers to precisely predict the property of applications to be processed. This paper proposes a reconfigurable switch which minimizes buffer overflow in various multimedia applications running on an NoC system. To verify the performance of the proposed system, we performed experiments on various multimedia applications running on embedded systems, such as MPEG4 and MP3 decoder, GPS positioning system, and OFDM demodulator. Experimental results show that buffer overflow has been decreased by 41.8% and 29.0%, respectively, when compared with NoC systems having sub-clusters with mesh or star topology. Power usage has been increased by 2.3% compared with hybrid NoC systems using fixed switches, and chip area has been increased from -0.6% to 5.7% depending on sub-cluster topology.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2022.10a
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• pp.459-461
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• 2022

One of the big differences between Network-on-Chip (NoC) and the existing parallel processing system based on an off-chip network is that data packet routing is performed using a centralized control scheme. In such an environment, the best-effort packet routing problem becomes a real-time assignment problem in which data packet arriving time and processing time is the cost. In this paper, the Hungarian algorithm, a representative computational complexity reduction algorithm for the linear algebraic equation of the allocation problem, is implemented in the form of a hardware accelerator. As a result of logic synthesis using the TSMC 0.18um standard cell library, the area of the circuit designed through case analysis for the cost distribution is reduced by about 16% and the propagation delay of it is reduced by about 52%, compared to the circuit implementing the original operation sequence of the Hungarian algorithm.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.93-100
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• 2008

In this paper, we address a novel simulated annealing(SA)-based test scheduling method for testing network-on-chip (NoC)-based systems-on-chip(SoCs), on the assumption that the test platform proposed in [1] is installed. The proposed method efficiently mixed the rectangle packing method with SA and improved the scheduling results by locally changing the test access mechanism(TAM) widths for cores and the testing orders. Experimental results using ITC'02 benchmark circuits show that the proposed algorithm can efficiently reduce the overall test time.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.46 no.8
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• pp.22-30
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• 2009

Due to high levels of integration and complexity, the Network-on-Chip (NoC) approach has emerged as a new design paradigm to overcome on-chip communication issues and data bandwidth limits in conventional SoC(System-on-Chip) design. In particular, exponentially growing of energy consumption caused by high frequency, synchronization and distributing a single global clock signal throughout the chip have become major design bottlenecks. To deal with these issues, a globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS) design combined with low power techniques is considered. Such a design style fits nicely with the concept of voltage-frequency-islands (VFI) which has been recently introduced for achieving fine-grain system-level power management. In this paper, we propose an efficient design methodology that minimizes energy consumption by VFI partitioning on an NoC architecture as well as assigning supply and threshold voltage levels to each VFI. The proposed algorithm which find VFI and appropriate core (or processing element) supply voltage consists of traffic-aware core graph partitioning, communication contention delay-aware tile mapping, power variation-aware core dynamic voltage scaling (DVS), power efficient VFI merging and voltage update on the VFIs Simulation results show that average 10.3% improvement in energy consumption compared to other existing works.