DART: A Programmable Architecture for NoC Simulation on FPGAs

Abstract

The increased demand for on-chip communication bandwidth as a result of the multicore trend has made packet-switched networks-on-chip (NoCs) a more compelling choice for the communication backbone in next-generation systems . However, NoC designs have many power, area, and performance tradeoffs in topology, buffer sizes, routing algorithms, and flow control mechanisms hence, the study of new NoC designs can be very time intensive. To address these challenges, we propose DART, a fast and flexible FPGA-based NoC simulation architecture. Rather than laying the NoC out in hardware on the FPGA like previous approaches , , our design virtualizes the NoC by mapping its components to a generic NoC simulation engine, composed of a fully connected collection of fundamental components (e.g., routers and flit queues). This approach has two main advantages: 1) since it is virtualized it can simulate any NoC, and 2) any NoC can be mapped to the engine without rebuilding it, which can take significant time for a large FPGA design. We demonstrate 1) that an implementation of DART on a Virtex-II Pro FPGA can achieve over $(100\times)$ speedup over the cycle-based software simulator Booksim , while maintaining the same level of simulation accuracy, and 2) that a more modern Virtex-6 FPGA can accommodate a 49-node DART implementation.