Evaluation of energy and buffer aware application mapping for networks-on-chip

Networks-on-Chip (NoC) is a communication paradigm for Systems-on-Chip (SoC). NoC design flow contains many problems, one of which is called as application mapping problem, which is generally solved in the literature by considering minimization of the communication energy consumption only. Energy and Buffer Aware Application Mapping (EBAM) is a recently proposed method, which handles the application mapping issue as a joint optimization problem for minimizing the energy consumption and buffer utilization simultaneously. EBAM avoids possible high input loads on router buffers at the early mapping stage by using a priori traffic characteristics of the application. Self similarity is already an accepted model in local and wide area networks and many on-chip applications have also been proven to have self similar characteristics. EBAM therefore employs self similar traffic in its joint optimization process and a genetic algorithm is already proposed for its solution.