Electronic Design: AI Automation Builds Better NoCs

Arteris’s FlexNoC uses artificial intelligence to create more efficient network-on-chip configurations.

What you’ll learn:

• Why efficient network-on-chip (NoC) solutions are hard to build.
• How artificial intelligence is helping to improve NoC configuration.

A network-on-chip (NoC) is central to today’s system-on-chip (SoC) solutions that often incorporate GPUs and artificial-intelligence (AI) accelerators with a memory and CPU complex. Most electronic design automation (EDA) designers rarely design their own NoC from scratch.

Arteris’s FlexNoC is an EDA tool for generating NoC logic to connect components on a chip based on a designer’s specification. FlexNoC handles the details while the designer defines where the connections go and what functionality is required. FlexNoC supports hard and soft tiling and AI is used to enhance the interconnect.

The latest enhancement is FlexGen. FlexGen provides additional automation building atop FlexNoC using AI heuristics, which the designer can customize by specifying goals. It helps optimize latency and reduce wire length and overall area (see figure).

Results from using FlexGen will vary depending on the chip components and design, but in many cases, FlexGen has improved productivity by a factor of 10 while reducing wire length by more than 25%.

To read the full article on Electronic Design, click here.