Development and verification of system -on -a -chip communication architecture

Recent advances in VLSI technology have led to a dramatic increase in the computation capacities of a single chip. This proliferation of on-chip resources enables the integration of complex system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs containing a wide range of intellectual property (IP) cores. To provide high performance, SoC integration tools must consider the design of individual IP cores, their on-chip interconnections, and application mapping approaches. In this dissertation, the latter two design issues are addressed through the introduction of a new on-chip communications architecture, adaptive System-on-Chip (aSoC), and its supporting compilation software. In aSoC, each computation core is associated with a communication interface, which is connected to each other as a two-dimensional mesh. Communication between cores takes place via pipelined, point-to-point connections. The communications are restricted to short wires between cores to allow high speed data transfer and predictable delays. The interface design can be customized based on core data bandwidths and operating frequencies to allow for efficient use of resources. The power and clock are supplied individually in each tile for diverse working environments of heterogeneous cores. A supporting software tool, AppMapper, was developed to map applications onto aSoC. AppMapper analyzes the high level language applications, schedules the on-chip communications, and configures the communication interfaces in aSoC. To evaluate the performance of aSoC, applications are mapped onto the aSoC model chips. The chosen applications include MPEG-II encoder/decoder, image smoothing filter, IIR filter, Doppler radar decoder, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulator, and a Turbo decoding system. A novel adaptive Soft-output Viterbi algorithm (ASOVA) is developed for the Turbo decoder to reduce the computation complexity. By varying the number of survivor paths, ASOVA is capable of adapting its decoding complexity to speed up the decoding in the case of high signal to noise ratio (SNR). These applications are mapped onto aSoC model devices and compared to other on-chip communication architectures with the same partitioning. The evaluated architectures include the hierarchical bus modeled from IBM CoreConnect on-chip communication and a dynamic routing model applying oblivious dynamic routing. Based on the simulation results, aSoC outperforms the hierarchical bus model by a factor of five