Performance analysis of application-specific instruction-set routers in networks-on-chip

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a well-known communication infrastructure to design large scalable MPSoCs. Data transfers in NoCs can take up a significant part of a parallel application. To avoid that the communication costs decelerate the system performance, application-specific instruction-set routers (ASIRs) can be used. ASIRs combine data transfers with application-specific processing by adding high-level synthesized processing units to routers. This work explores the performance of ASIR-based MPSoCs. Moreover, an ASIR-based MPSoC that sonifies a distance profile measured by a LIDAR sensor on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 is developed. Besides the impact of external sensors, the evaluation results show that the speedup of a single task can be significantly increased up to a factor of 5x.