Techniques for reducing read latency of core bus wrappers

Today's system-on-a-chip designs consist of many cores, To enable cores to be easily integrated into different systems, many propose creating cores with their internal logic separated from their wrapper. This separation may introduce extra read latency. Pre-fetching register data into register copies in the bus wrapper can reduce or eliminate this extra latency. In this paper, we introduce a technique for automatically designing a pre-fetch unit that satisfies user-imposed register-access constraints. The technique benefits from mapping the pre-fetching problem to the well-known real-time process scheduling problem. We then extend the technique to allow user-specified register interdependencies, using a Petri net model, resulting in even more efficient pre-fetch schedules.