ASOC: a scalable, single-chip communications architecture

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 paper, a new single-chip interconnect architecture, adaptive System-On-a-Chip, 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.