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The aggressive scaling of the semiconductor technology following the Moore’s Law has delivered true system-on-chip (SoC) integration. Network-on-chip (NoC) has been recently introduced as an effective solution for scalable on-chip communication since dedicated point-to-point (P2P) interconnection and shared bus architecture become performance and power bottlenecks in the SoCs. This dissertation studies three critical NoC challenges such as latency, power, and compatibility with emerging technologies in aspect of an architecture and physical design level. Latency is a key issue in NoC since the performance of applications considerably depends on resource sharing policies employed in an on-chip network. NoCs have been mainly developed to improve network-level performance that captures the inherent performance characteristics of a network itself, but the network-level optimizations are not directly related to application- or system-level performance. In addition, memory latency on NoC critically affects the performance of applications or systems. We propose a synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM) aware NoC design to optimize memory throughput, latency, and design complexity. Furthermore, it is extended to an application-aware NoC design to provide the quality-of-service (QoS) of memory for various applications. NoC provides great on-chip communication. However, it brings no true relief to power budget when the on-chip network scales in terms of complexity/size and signal bandwidth. The combination of NoC and other techniques has the potential to reduce power. We study two power saving research topics for NoC: (a) we propose a voltage-frequency island (VFI) aware NoC optimization framework with a better tradeoff between power efficiency and design complexity to minimize both computation and on-chip communication power. (b) We formulate an application mapping problem to mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) with the purpose of reducing power consumption in various hard networks and develop highly efficient algorithms for the MIQP. Regarding NoC compatible with new technologies, we focus on three dimensional (3D) die integration based on through-silicon vias (TSVs). Since an on-chip network design has been subject to not only application constraints but also design/manufacturing constraints, a 3D NoC design is required for innovation in interconnection networks. We propose a chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) aware application-specific 3D NoC design that minimizes TSV height variation, thus reduces bonding failure, and meanwhile optimizes conventional NoC design objectives such as hop count, wirelength, power, and area.