OpenSoC Fabric: On-chip network generator
Farzad Fatollahi-Fard, David Donofrio, George Michelogiannakis, John M. Shalf · 2016
As technology scaling continues, on-chip networks are expected to remain important in future many-core chips due to the increased parallelism and, therefore, communication. However, designing and evaluating large-scale on-chip networks is a nontrivial task given the poor scalability of software simulation for thousands of cores and the intense development effort to develop hardware RTL. In this paper, we describe OpenSoC Fabric. OpenSoC Fabric is a comprehensive on-chip network generator written in Chisel. Chisel generates both C++ and Verilog models from a single code base and has a development effort comparable to functional programming. We describe the internal architecture of OpenSoC Fabric and its powerful list of configuration parameters. We then compare OpenSoC Fabric against pre-validated state-of-the-art simulators using both the generated C++ and Verilog models using FPGAs.