Channel trees
Andreas Hansson, Martijn Coenen, Kees G. W. Goossens · 2007
Networks on Chip (NoC) have emerged as the design paradigm for scalable System on Chip communication infrastructure. A growing number of applications, often with firm (FRT) or soft real-time (SRT) requirements, are integrated on the same chip. To provide time-related guarantees, NoC resources are reserved, e.g. by non-work-conserving time-division multiplexing (TDM). Traditionally, reservations are made on a per-communication-channel basis, thus providing FRT guarantees to individual channels. For SRT applications, this strategy is overly restrictive, as slack bandwidth is not used to improve performance.