As part of the Mont Blanc 2020, European scalable, modular and power efficient HPC processor, ATOS designs and implement a NoC which includes NoC Xpoints, Protocol agents and system cache.

Our Network on Chip (NoC) is based on basic Xpoint modules which are connected to each other to make a scalable NoC. Each Xpoint module has :

• 4 internal CHI Interface (1 per direction) where all the Xpoint modules are connected to
• 2 End Points CHI Interface which are the entry/exit points of IPs on the System on Chip (Soc)

A CHI interface contains 4 channels interfaces: Request, Data, Snoop and Response. Each channel is fully configurable in each direction and is implemented with Configurable System Verilog Interface. This makes a lot of parameters to handle as we plan to implement an 8x8 NoC which includes 64 Xpoint modules with corresponding parameters set accordingly.

Defacto STAR tool is used to efficiently:

• instantiate all the Xpoint modules with corresponding parameters
• connect all the channels with corresponding System Verilog Interface
• connect the Error, status and configuration interfaces
• connect Protocol Agent on End Point interface (internally)
• create NoC entity.

The main benefits to choose Defacto STAR is

• NoC configuration change and RTL generation in 15 s
• No need to develop our own tools

NoC module will then be integrated at SoC level and connected to IPs delivered by Third-parties. We also use Defacto STAR tool to generate the SoC RTL and associated Testbench.