The MANGO clockless network-on-chip: Concepts and implementation

Abstract

This dissertation addresses aspects of on-chip interconnection networks. The scientific contributions of the thesis are twofold. First, a survey of existing research is made. The survey categorizes, structures and reviews a wide spectrum of work in this new academic field, giving an overview of the state-of-the-art. Secondly, issues are covered which relate to the practical design of a network enabling a modular and scalable design flow for giga scale system-on-chip designs. Proof of concepts is given by their implementation in the MANGO (Messagepassing Asynchronous Network-on-chip providing Guaranteed services over OCP interfaces) network-on-chip (NoC) architecture, which was developed during the course of the PhD-project.The main body of the thesis is composed of a set of research papers. One of these is the mentioned survey, while five other papers explain concepts of the MANGO architecture, their implementation, and deployment in a complete MANGO-based system. Preceeding the papers, an introduction provides an overview of the thesis and explains the key features of MANGO, which are: clockless implementation, guaranteed communication services and standard socket access points. Also, the introduction touches upon industrial use of NoC