Modular SoC-design : Minimizing area and power consumption

This is the main report for Mattias Larsson’s degree project for the Master’s programin System-on-Chip. The main part of this project has been to design a modularMPSoC-unit (Multi Processor System on Chip) for reuse in different typesof projects. A SoC includes and interconnects a processor and FPGA in one chip.MPSoC is an extension of SoC including more than one processor. Zynq Ultra-Scale MPSoC has been used in this design which comes in three different versionsCG, EG and EV. In this project the EG version has been used, this versionhas a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 platform, two Cortex-R5 real-time processorand Mali-400 MP2 graphics processing unit.The modular MPSoC-unit is designed to be used in a project as the main computingunit. A modular unit has to be general enough to fit almost all demandsbut as small as possible. The area usage is always an important question butsince the modular MPSoC-unit will be designed once and have a certain size andshape its overall area coverage determines how usable it will be. It is thereforhighly important to keep the area as small as possible.This project has been focused on the design of a modular SoC-unit with focuson a schematic-level. This report raises and answers question as too which extentsit is worth using certain types of DC/DC regulators, on-chip functionalityetc. A big part of the design work has been dedicated towards the DC/DC regulationand generation of voltages to supply the circuits. The MPSoC requires anumber of voltage levels of which some supplies can be tied together while othersare analog and sensitive to digital switching noise on the supply. This reportinvestigates the possibilities to use a simple ferrite bead filter for sensitive loadssharing the same supply. Extra work has gone into trying to reduce the numberof regulators. In order to design a safe and general power supply an estimation ofthe power consumption has to be done. This report shows how to find, use and estimatethe power consumption for the main power consumer in the system. Withthis information a generic modular SoC-design approach can be found