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Abstract:
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In the future there will be integrated circuits with billions of transistors on the chip. Internal communication in this kind of system is very demanding and it cannot be realized with traditional bus-based solutions. One proposal to solve this communication paradigm is to use Network-on-Chip. This kind of interconnection Network is developed at the Institute of Digital and Computer Systems at the Tampere University of Technology. This network is called PROTEO, after the Greek god who could change his form at will. PROTEO network is constructed from three basic elements: nodes, bridges and links. Nodes are used to connect functional IP blocks to the network Through VCI interface and bridges to connect several sub-networks together, and data between the nodes and bridges is transferred through the links. The PROTEO network is a packet-switching network, which builds packets from the interface signals. Those packets are currently delivered to the receiver using a deterministic routing algorithm. Three different kinds of communication protocols exist for the PROTEO. Two of them construct a packet from each VCI cell whereas the third protocol includes several cells in a single packet. The purpose of this work was to implement PROTEO network nodes with synthesizable VHDL. The nodes were designed to be as flexible as possible to configured easily to different kinds of communication environments. The VCI standard defines that there are two different kinds of actors in communication protocol. After the nodes were implemented, the performances of different protocols were estimated with a test network. /Kir10 |