Thermal-aware IP visualization and placement for networks-on-chip architecture

Networks-on-Chip (NoC), a new SoC paradigm, has been proposed as a solution to mitigate complex on-chip interconnect problems. NoC architecture consists of a collection of IP cores or processing elements (PEs) interconnected by on-chip switching fabrics or routers. Hardware virtualization, which maps logic processing units onto PEs, affects the power consumption of each PE and the communications among PEs. The communication among PEs affects the overall performance and router power consumption, and it depends on the placement of PEs. Therefore, the temperature distribution profile of the chip depends on the IP core virtualization and placement. In this paper, we present an IP virtualization and placement algorithm for generic regular Network on Chip (NoC) architecture. The algorithm attempts to achieve a thermal balanced design while minimizing the communication cost via placement. Our framework can also realize hardware virtualization which can further accomplish better performance. A case study on Low Density Parity Checks (LDPC) decoder is presented to evaluate our algorithm.