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SNP: A New On-Chip Communication Protocol for SoC  

Lee Jaesung (서울대학교 전기컴퓨터공학부)
Lee Hyuk-Jae (서울대학교 전기컴퓨터공학부)
Lee Chanho (숭실대학교 정보통신전자공학부)
Publication Information
Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory / v.32, no.9, 2005 , pp. 465-474 More about this Journal
Abstract
For high density SoC design, on-chip communication based on bus interconnection encounters bandwidth limitation while an NoC(Network-on-Chip) approach suffers from unacceptable complexity in its Implementation. This paper introduces a new on-chip communication protocol, SNP (SoC Network Protocol) to overcome these problems. In SNP, conventional on-chip bus signals are categorized into three groups, control, address, and data and only one set of wires is used to transmit all three groups of signals, resulting in the dramatic decrease of the number of wires. SNP efficiently supports master-master communication as well as master-slave communication with symmetric channels. A sequencing rule of signal groups is defined as a part of SNP specification and a phase-restoration feature is proposed to avoid redundant signals transmitted repeatedly over back-to-back transactions. Simulation results show that SNP provides about the same bandwidth with only $54\%$ of wires when compared with AMBA AHB.
Keywords
System-on-Chip; multimedia; on-chip interconnection; communication protocol; bus architecture;
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Times Cited By KSCI : 1  (Citation Analysis)
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