SemiWiki: Interconnect Basics: Wires to Crossbar to NoC

To many of us, if we ever think about interconnect on an SoC, we may think delay, power consumption, congestion, that sort of thing. All important points from an implementation point of view, but what about the functional and system implications? In the early days, interconnect was very democratic, all wires more or less equal, connecting X to Y wherever needed. If you had a data bus, you’d route that more carefully to ensure roughly equal delays for each bit, which works pretty well when you don’t have a lot of on-chip functions. But there’s more to it than that. This blog is a quick introduction to interconnect basics.