@conference {37.RegLaj2005, title = {Hardware/Software Partitioning and Interface Synthesis in Networks On Chip}, booktitle = {IP Based SoC Design 2005}, year = {2005}, month = {December 7-8}, address = {Grenoble, France}, abstract = {With deep sub-micron technology, chip designers are expected to create System-On-Chip (SOC) solutions by connecting different Intellectual Property (IP) blocks using efficient and reliable interconnection schemes. On chip networks are quite compelling because, by applying networking techniques to on-chip communication, they allow to implement a fully distributed communication pattern with little or no global coordination. This avoids the problems due to the difficulty of implementing future chips with one single clock source and negligible skew. On the other hand, in order to benefit from the NOC communication paradigm, designers should perform a careful functional mapping for taking advantage of spatial locality, by placing the blocks that communicate more frequently closer together. This reduces the use of long global paths and the corresponding energy dissipation. In this work we show how a tile based NOC architecture can be exploited in order to support a flexible hardware/software partitioning of a system-level specification and we present a methodology for the automatic synthesis of the hardware/software interfaces.}, keywords = {HW/SW co-design, network-on-chip (NoC), system-on-chip (SoC)}, author = {Regazzoni, Francesco and Lajolo, Marcello} }