Jingcao Hu Carnegie Mellon University

Energy-Aware On-chip Communication: Challenges and Opportunities

The Network-On-Chip (NoC) approach based on regular tile-based architectures has been recently proposed as an efficient solution for on-chip communication. Indeed, the on-chip packet-based communication brings the promise of higher throughput, flexibility, and greater reusability, compared to standard bus-based approaches for on-chip communication.

In this talk, I will discuss the pros and cons of on-chip packet-based communication and justify certain design considerations for such architectures. I will then present an efficient algorithm for mapping the set of target IP cores to different tiles for regular NoC architectures, with the overall goal of minimizing the energy consumption under tight performance constraints. Finally, I will illustrate how this algorithm can be extended to exploit the routing flexibility to achieve better results for a generic multimedia application.

Bio
Jingcao Hu is a graduate student in the ECE department at CMU working towards his Ph.D. under the guidance of Prof. Radu Marculescu. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electronics engineering, in 1998 and 2000, respectively, both from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His research interests are in the area of system-level design methodologies with particular emphasis on on-chip communication
aspects.