semiconductor chip

Electronic Design: Breaking Barriers in SoC Design with Smart NoC Automation

semiconductor chip
  • Andy Nightingale
  • < 1 min read
As SoCs grow in complexity, manual NoC generation is no longer practical. This article highlights how automated NoC generation streamlines interconnect development to improve efficiency, scalability, and performance in advanced semiconductor designs.

What you’ll learn:

  • Challenges in NoC design.
  • The paradigm shift to NoC automation.
  • Real-world performance gains with automated smart NoC IP generation.
  • A smarter approach to NoC design.

The evolution of semiconductor design has driven modern systems-on-chip (SoCs) to unprecedented levels of complexity. Today’s leading-edge SoCs often integrate hundreds of intellectual-property (IP) blocks, spanning multiple processing units, specialized accelerators, and high-speed interconnects. This rapid expansion is further fueled by the rise of multi-die architectures to extend scalability and performance beyond the limitations of traditional monolithic designs.

These advances come with significant challenges, particularly in managing the interconnect fabric that enables seamless data flow across the chip. Traditional interconnect solutions, such as crossbars and bus-based architectures, have given way to networks-on-chip (NoCs), which provide scalable, high-bandwidth communication while optimizing power efficiency.

Engineers must still manually implement certain aspects of the NoC design, though, making the process labor-intensive. Any time design tasks are done manually, errors may be introduced. However, as the scale of SoCs increases, NoC design has reached a tipping point where manual implementation is no longer feasible.

Challenges in NoC Design

Designing an efficient NoC is a multifaceted process involving numerous interdependencies. It begins with defining the communication requirements for each IP block, specifying interface protocols, data widths, and performance constraints. Designers must also determine the topology of the NoC, selecting from options such as mesh or tree configurations to optimize bandwidth, latency, and area.

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