System-on-a-Chip Interconnect
As on-chip integration matures, single-chip system designers must not only be concerned with component-level issues such as performance and power, but also with on-chip system-level issues such as adaptability and scalability. Recent trends indicate that next generation systems will require new architectures and compilation tools that effectively deal with these constraints. In this work, a new single-chip interconnect architecture, adaptive System-On-a-Chip (aSOC), is described that not only provides scalable data transfer, but also can be easily reconfigured as application-level communication patterns change. An important aspect of the architecture is its support for compile-time, scheduled communication. To illustrate the benefits of the architecture, three DSP benchmarks have been mapped to candidate SoC devices of assorted sizes which contain the new interconnect architecture. The described interconnect architecture is shown to be up to 5 times more efficient than bus-based SoC interconnect architectures via parallel simulation. Additionally, a preliminary layout of our architecture is shown and derived area and performance parameters are presented.
  • J. Liang, A. Laffely, S. Srinivasan, and R. Tessier, An Architecture and Compiler for Scalable On-Chip Communication, in IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, vol. 12, no. 7, July 2004, pp. 711-726. Download Postscript Document Download Adobe PDF Document
  • P. Jain, A. Laffely, W. Burleson, R. Tessier, and D. Goeckel, Dynamically Parameterized Algorithms and Architectures to Exploit Signal Variations, in Journal of VLSI Signal Processing, vol. 36, no. 1, January 2004, pp. 27-40. Download Postscript Document Download Adobe PDF Document
  • A. Laffely, J. Liang, P. Jain, N. Weng, W. Burleson and R. Tessier, Adaptive Systems on a Chip (aSoC) for Low-Power Signal Processing, in the Proceedings of the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, Monterey, California, November 2001. Download Adobe PDF Document
  • R. Tessier and W. Burleson, Reconfigurable Computing and Digital Signal Processing: A Survey, in Journal of VLSI Signal Processing, May/June 2001, pp 7-27. Download Postscript Document Download Adobe PDF Document
  • W. Burleson, R. Tessier, D. Goeckel, S. Swaminathan, P. Jain, J. Euh, S. Venkatraman and V. Thyagarajan, Dynamically Parameterized Algorithms and Architectures to Exploit Signal Variations for Improved Performance and Reduced Power, in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing 2001 (ICASSP'01), Salt Lake City, Utah, May 2001. Download Adobe PDF Document
  • J. Liang, S. Swaminathan, and R. Tessier, aSOC: A Scalable, Single-Chip Communications Architecture, in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, Philadelphia, PA. October 2000. Download Postscript Document Download Adobe PDF Document