A run-time reconfigurable NoC Monitoring System for performance analysis and debugging support

Abstract

Recently Network-on-Chip based architectures become more and more important due to their advantages in respect to design flexibility and systems bandwidth scalability since nowadays systems consists typically of a huge number of processing elements (e.g. heterogeneous multi processor systems). In contrast to typical shared memory based systems, predicting and monitoring the runtime behaviour of the system e.g. data throughput, link utilization and contention becomes more complex and requires special architectural features. Besides the traditional approach of using simulation based approaches at design time, runtime usable features promise to have a number of advantages. In this paper we present a flexible, reusable and run-time reconfigurable NoC monitoring system for performance analysis and debugging purposes. The evaluation of the monitoring data enables the system designer to achieve better resource utilization by adjusting the system architecture and the programming model.