How does Network on Chip communication work and what is its use?
In: Engineering
An Integrated Circuit (“microchip”) like a microprocessor often has many different functional blocks inside of it. Arithmetic Logic Unit, Integer Unit, Instruction Pre-Fetch Unit, cache memories, etc. etc. Many of these different blocks need to send information to each other. Not every block needs to communicate with every other one, but a lot of them have to communicate with many others.
Traditionally, this was accomplished by running a point to point “bus” between each pair. This bus might be many bits in parallel (the “width”). As the number of blocks that need to communicate goes up, the number of busses rises rapidly. Since they are many bits wide and may have to run a significant distance across the chip, this can take up a lot of area. Area = Cost to produce.
A NoC architecture does this a different way. Instead of running a bus between every pair, there’s one bus that goes to every block, like a wired network. Every block has an address, and the other blocks can send it data on the shared bus by first sending its address.
Using this kind of scheme not only makes the chip smaller, it simplifies the physical design (layout) and can significantly reduce power consumption.
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