Network-on-Multi-Chip (NoMC) with Monitoring and Debugging Support

This paper summarizes recent research on network-on-multi-chip (NoMC) at Poznań University of Technology. The proposed network architecture supports hierarchical addressing and multicast transition mode. Such an approach provides new debugging functionality hardly attainable in classical hardware testing methodology. A multicast transmission also enables real-time packet monitoring. The introduced features of NoC network allow to elaborate a model of hardware video codec that utilizes distributed processing on many FPGAs. Final performance of the designed network was assessed using a model of AVC coder and multi-FPGA platforms. In such a system, the introduced multicast transmission mode yields overall gain of bandwidth up to 30%. Moreover, synthesis results show that the basic network components designed in Verilog language are suitable and easily synthesizable for FPGA devices.