Network-on-Chip - towards communication-centric System-on-Chip design

Wednesday April 6, 2005
Hamerschlag Hall D-210
4:30 pm

Tobias Bjerregaard
Technical University of Denmark

Effects of technology scaling, together with the increased routing congestion in large complex chips, make it unavoidably necessary to differentiate between local and global on-chip communication. The demand for IP reuse and system level scalability is growing, and the design methodologies in use today are inadequately geared for dealing with the problems at hand. There is a general consensus that shared, segmented interconnection structures--so called networks-on-a-chip (NoC)--constitute a viable solution space to emerging system-on-chip (SoC) design challenges. NoC holds the potential to leverage the global communication requirements as well as the design flow of giga-scale SoC designs, while accommodating the effects of deep submicron technologies. This talk will introduce the concept of NoC, discussing important issues and motivation from a design flow as well as a technology-oriented point of view. The speaker will also present the MANGO NoC architecture being developed at the Technical University of Denmark, explaining how its key features facilitate a modular design flow.

Tobias Bjerragaard received his MSEE in the field of micro-electronics from the Center for Communication, Optics and Materials at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 2000. Here after he joined the fabless ASIC start-up company IP Semiconductors, designing a network processor chip, doing floorplanning, place-and-route and integration of custom hard macros in the standard cell design. In 2002 he received a university grant to pursue a PhD-degree in the field of Network-on-Chip, at DTU. Currently he is visiting the Phoenix group at the Department of Computer Science at CMU.