High-Level Programming of Dynamically Reconfigurable NoC-Based Heterogeneous Multicore SoCs

Abstract

With the increase in System-on-Chip (SoC) complexity and CMOS technology capabilities, the SoC design community has recently observed a convergence of a number of critical trends, all of them aimed at addressing the design gap: the advent of heterogeneous multicore SoCs and Networks-on-Chip and the recognition of the need for design reuse through Intellectual Property (IP) cores, for dynamic reconfigurability and for high abstraction-level design. In this chapter, we present a solution for High-level Programming of Dynamically Reconfigurable NoC-based Heterogeneous Multicore SoCs. Our solution, the Gannet framework, allows IP core-based Heterogeneous Multicore SoCs to be programmed using a high-level language whilst preserving the full potential for parallelism and dynamic reconfigurability inherent in such a system. The required hardware infrastructure is small and low-latency, thus adding full dynamic reconfiguration capabilities with a small overhead both in area and performance.