Design And Implementation Of The Dual-core Resource In Network-on-Chip

As integrated circuit industry developing at high speed, multi-core technique such as NoC and MPSoC has become the most popular design techniques in the next generation of IC design. It has shown its great prominence in improving parallel performance of the system when employing it instead of single processor. Up to now, most researches on NoC have focused on topological structures and always applied a single processor as resource in NoC. The research on how to improve the performance of NoC by optimizing the internal structures of the resource has never been studied.This dissertation focused on the design of dual-core resource in 2-dimension mesh NoC, and proposed the concept of multi-core resource, which meant two or more processors being used in one resource in NoC system. All these processors can be different or same, which are heterogenous or symmetric in another word. Considering the functional requirement of resource in NoC, we designed a heterogenous one which integrating two different processors, that is, the ARM processor taking the responsibility of calculation and the 8086 processor being in charge of communication. The results of the experiments indicated that, the heterogenous dual-core resource in NoC can perform much better than the traditional resource which contained only a single processor in improving the performance of the system.This dissertation was supported by the following projects:·The project of "Basic Research of Network-on-Chip Architecture and the Design Methodology" supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (№:60576034);·The project of "Research of On-Chip-Network Key Technology of Network-on-Chip" supported by the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (№.20050359003);·The project of "Basic Research of Embedded MPSoC" supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province (№:070412031).The main work and achievement were as follows:1. The dual-core resource in 2-dimension mesh NoC was designed at RTL. The heterogenous processors can communicate with each other, and the design satisfied the requirements of the whole system. 2. Prototyping the whole system based on Stratix II EP2S180 FPGA development board. Experimental results had been obtained running at 50MHz. The experimental results showed that the dual-core resource in NoC can obtain better performance.3. The FFT experiment was implemented on the system to simulate and verify our design. The experimental results indicated that dual-core resource can perform much better than the traditional resource which contained only a single processor in improving the performance of the system.