Online allocation for contention-free-routing NoCs

Time-division-multiplexed networks based on the contention- free routing model represent an attractive high-performance and low-cost solution for on-chip communication thanks to their low buffer requirements at the router level. Tradition- ally, allocating the slots for each connection in the network TDM tables was performed at design time, thus requiring prior knowledge of the application communication demands and as a consequence making this approach unfeasible to certain classes of problems. In this paper we propose per- forming the slot allocation on demand, at run time. While this approach is not new, we improve upon the state-of-the- art in terms of speed by more than one order of magnitude, while at the same time requiring less memory space.