A High-Performance On-Chip Bus (MSBUS) Design and Verification

This brief proposes a high-performance system-on-chip bus protocol termed the master–slave bus (MSBUS). Considering the inevitable tradeoff among area, throughput and energy efficiency, the control bus is developed as a low-cost and low-power bus, and the data bus is created as a high-throughput full-duplex bus with the feature of block data transfer. To evaluate the bus performance, we create four analytical models including transfer time consumption (TC), wire efficiency (WE), valid data bandwidth (VDB) and dynamic energy efficiency. Then, the advanced high-performance bus-, advanced eXensible interface (AXI)-, and MSBUS-based direct memory access (DMA) are developed as a case study of hardware implementation. It is observed that MSBUS DMA costs less hardware resources and achieves higher performance, especially in the block transfer mode. For instance, the results from both the analytical models and the practical tests show that the TC of MSBUS is close to 63% of the AXI, the WE and VDB of MSBUS are almost 2.3 and 1.6 times of the AXI respectively, and the energy consumption is half of AXI in the block transfer mode.