Automated Bus Generation for Multiprocessor SoC Design

Abstract—The performance of a multiprocessor system heavily depends upon the efficiency of its bus architecture. This paper presents a methodology to generate a custom bus system for a multiprocessor System-on-a-Chip (SoC). Our bus synthesis tool, which we call BusSyn, uses this methodology to generate five different bus systems as examples: Bi-FIFO Bus Architecture (BFBA), Global Bus Architecture Version I (GBAVI), Global Bus Architecture Version III (GBAVIII), Hybrid bus architecture (Hybrid) and Split Bus Architecture (SplitBA). We verify and evaluate the performance of each bus system in the context of three applications: an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) wireless transmitter, an MPEG2 decoder and a database example. This methodology gives the designer a great benefit in fast design space exploration of bus architectures across a variety of performance impacting factors such as bus types, processor types and software programming style. In this paper, we show that BusSyn can generate buses that, when compared to a typical General Global Bus Architecture (GGBA), achieve superior performance (e.g., 41 % reduction in execution time in the case of a database example). In addition, the bus architecture generated by BusSyn is designed in a matter of seconds instead of weeks for the hand design of a custom bus system. Index Terms—Bus architecture, bus generation, design space exploration, Intellectual Property (IP), System-on-a-Chip (SoC), synthesis