Towards a design space exploration methodology for system-on-chip

This paper provides an overview of a design space exploration methodology for customizing or tuning a candidate OCI architecture, given a resources budget and independent of a particular application traffic pattern. Three main approaches are introduced. The first approach allows customizing the On- Chip Interconnect by adding strategic long-rang links, while the second consists in customizing the buffer sizes at each switch according to the traffic. The third approach uses a feedback control-based mechanism for dynamic congestion avoidance. Some results are presented to shed more light on the usefulness of these approaches for System-on-Chip design.