A Floorplan-aware Interactive Tool Flow for NoC Design and Synthesis

In this paper we present a floorplan-aware toolchain for NoC design and synthesis integrated with a graphical front-end. The resulting design methodology is highly automated yet entails rich interaction with the user, spanning across traffic flow specification, topology synthesis and physical floorplanning, with back-annotation capabilities and opportunities for incremental design. We exploit the proposed tool to implement some NoC-based case studies. We show that not only a great amount of time and effort can be saved thanks to the easy-to-use proposed environment, but also that the quality of the final netlist improves due to the optimizations unlocked by the early-stage interaction among the designer and the proposed toolchain.