5.1 Introduction
In chapters 2, 3, and 4, we have seen how to design a router fabric following a specific topology (such as mesh, mesh-of-tree, and butterfly fat tree). However, a complete network-on-chip (NoC) system consists of the router fabric and the intellectual property (IP) cores. The router network is utilized to facilitate communication between these cores. Looking at the NoC design problem from a system perspective, the whole process starts with the specification of the system. The specification is refined into a set of interactive tasks that accomplish the system functionality. For example, Figure 5.1 shows a task-level decomposition of a video object plane decoder (VOPD) application. ...
