# HopliteRT*: Real-Time NoC for FPGA

Yilian Ribot Gonzalez (Corresponding author), Geoffrey Nelissen

## Abstract

With the increasing number of computation nodes integrated in multi and many-core platforms, network-on-chips (NoCs) emerged as a new communication medium in systems-on-chips (SoCs). HopliteRT is a new NoC design that was recently proposed to address the needs of real-time systems whilst respecting the constraints of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platforms. In this article, we: 1) introduce priority-based routing in HopliteRT; 2) change the network topology in order to improve the packets' worst-case traversal time (WCTT); 3) identify a flaw in the existing timing analysis of HopliteRT; and 4) develop a new timing analysis that is proven correct. We also show by means of experiments that the modifications of HopliteRT proposed in this article allows for at least $2\times$ improvement on the worst and average case traversal time of high priority packets, without impacting the quality of service of low-priority packets. The timing properties of high priority flows are greatly improved for negligible additional hardware costs. The proposed NoC has been implemented in Verilog and synthesized for a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA platform.

Original language English 9211415 3650-3661 12 IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems 39 11 https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2020.3012748 Published - Nov 2020

## Keywords

• Field programmable gate array
• network-on-chips
• real-time embedded systems
• systems-on-chips
• timing analysis