The Gannet Service Manager: A Distributed Dataflow Controller for Heterogeneous Multi-core SoCs

We present a novel circuit which acts as a generic interface for controlling the dataflow in a heterogeneous multicore system-on-chip (SoC). The Gannet service manager is a small, high-performance specialised processing unit aimed at NoC-based SoCs. It transforms a collection of heterogeneous IP cores into a coarse-grained distributed computing platform with full control over the data path. We discuss the overall SoC architecture and the design implementation of the service manager and demonstrate that the circuit outperforms a microcontroller-based implementation on speed, area and power consumption.