• network-on-chip
• NoC
• wormhole-routing
• wormhole-networks
• network-calculus

A Network on Chip is the communication system on an integrated circuit that enables the IP cores to exchange data with each other.

Inspired by large-scale network technologies, they are adapted to different requirements of integrated systems of area coverage, end-to-end delay and bandwidth.
With the diffusion mobile technologies and their increasing requirements of miniaturization and performance, it's increasingly difficult to design ad-hoc NoCs.

Network Calculus is a mathematical framework analysing performance guarantees in computer networks.
While successfully applied for the internet, its models are too simple to represent the NoC routing technologies, in particular wormhole routing, and its congestion issues.

To aid design of NoCs, in this work we show how to model wormhole networks using Network Calculus as a series of FCFS buffers, and how these models were used to develop an integrated tool to study worst-case end-to-end delay on a wormhole network.