Quality of Service in NoC for Reconfigurable Space Applications

Configurable System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions based on state-of-the art FPGA are a good candidate to fulfill the requirements of future high end onboard payload applications. Reliability, performance and flexibility provided by SoCs can be further extended using a new communication paradigm, the Network-on-a-Chip (NoC). NoCs have the potential to solve the scalability problem of traditional on-chip bus systems but may introduce uncertainties due to contention for shared network resources. This paper explores NoC solutions that provide QoS and propose a methodology for the seamless integration of payload data-handling protocols into a NoC architecture.