Breaking Barriers in SoC Design with Smart NoC Automation

By Andy Nightingale, Arteris

The evolution of semiconductor design has driven modern systems-on-chip (SoCs) to unprecedented levels of complexity. Today’s leading-edge SoCs often integrate hundreds of intellectual-property (IP) blocks, spanning multiple processing units, specialized accelerators, and high-speed interconnects. This rapid expansion is further fueled by the rise of multi-die architectures to extend scalability and performance beyond the limitations of traditional monolithic designs.

These advances come with significant challenges, particularly in managing the interconnect fabric that enables seamless data flow across the chip. Traditional interconnect solutions, such as crossbars and bus-based architectures, have given way to networks-on-chip (NoCs), which provide scalable, high-bandwidth communication while optimizing power efficiency.

Engineers must still manually implement certain aspects of the NoC design, though, making the process labor-intensive. Any time design tasks are done manually, errors may be introduced. However, as the scale of SoCs increases, NoC design has reached a tipping point where manual implementation is no longer feasible. 

What you’ll learn:

• Challenges in NoC design.
• The paradigm shift to NoC automation.
• Real-world performance gains with automated smart NoC IP generation.
• A smarter approach to NoC design.

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