• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.11_12
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• pp.629-638
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• 2005

In the System on a Chip design, the on chip bus is one of the critical factors that decides the overall system performance. Especially, in the case or reusing the IPs such as processors, DSPs and multimedia IPs that requires higher bandwidth, the bandwidth problems of on chip bus are getting more serious. Recently ARM proposes the Multi-Layer AHB BusMatrix that is a highly efficient on chip bus to solve the bandwidth problems. The Multi-Layer AHB BusMatrix allows parallel access paths between multiple masters and slaves in a system. This is achieved by using a more complex interconnection matrix and gives the benefit of increased overall bus bandwidth, and a more flexible system architecture. However, there is one clock cycle delay for each master in existing Multi-Layer AHB BusMatrix whenever the master starts new transactions or changes the slave layers because of the Input Stage and arbitration logic realized with Moore type. In this paper, we improved the existing Multi-Layer AHB BusMatrix architecture to solve the one clock cycle delay problems and to reduce the area overhead of the Input Stage. With the elimination of the Input Stage and some restrictions on the arbitration scheme, we tan take away the one clock cycle delay and reduce the area overhead. Experimental results show that the end time of total bus transaction and the average latency time of improved Multi-Layer AHB BusMatrix are improved by $20\%\;and\;24\%$ respectively. in ease of executing a number of transactions by 4-beat incrementing burst type. Besides the total area and the clock period are reduced by $22\%\;and\;29\%$ respectively, compared with existing Multi-layer AHB BusMatrix.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.553-555
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• 2004

SoC 분야에서 온 칩 버스는 전체 시스템의 성능을 결정하는 중요한 요소이다. 이에 따라 최근 ARM 사에서는 고성능 온 칩 버스 구조인 ML(Multi-Layer) AHB 버스를 제안하였다. ML AHB 버스는 저전력 임베디드 시스템에 적합한 버스 구조로써 현재 널리 사용되고 있다. 하지만, 고가이기 때문에 ADK(AMBA$^{TM}$ Design kit) 구매에 대한 부담이 적지 않다. 본 논문은 ML AHB의 버스 구조인 버스 매트릭스 구현 및 ADK에서 제공되지 않는 테스트 환경 즉, Protocol Checker 및 Performance Monitor Module 구현에 관한 것이다.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.105-116
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• 2008

Today's System-on-a-Chip (SoC) is designed with reusable IP cores to meet short time-to-market requirements. However, the increasing cost of testing becomes a big burden in manufacturing a highly integrated SoC. In this paper, we propose an efficient test access mechanism that exploits an on/off-chip bus bridge for the Advanced High-performance Bus (AHB) and Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus. The test application time is considerably reduced by providing dedicated test stimuli input paths and response output paths, and by excluding the bus direction tumaround delays. Experimental results show that area overhead and testing times are considerably reduced in both functional and structural test modes. The proposed technique can be a lied to the other types of on/off-chip bus bridges.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.56-62
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• 2002

A new high speed and low voltage swing on-chip BUS using threshold voltage swing driver and dual sense amplifier receiver is proposed. The threshold voltage swing driver reduces the rising time in the bus to 30% of the full CMOS inverter driver and the dual sense amplifier receiver increases twice the throughput. of the conventional reduced-swing buses using sense amplifier receiver. With threshold voltage swing driver and dual sense amplifier receiver combined, approximately 60% speed improvement and 75% power reduction are achieved in the proposed scheme compared to the conventional full CMOS inverter for the on-chip bus.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.35 no.11
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• pp.527-539
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• 2008

This paper presents a performance estimation technique based on queuing analysis for on-chip bus matrix architectures of Multi-Processor System-on-Chips(MPSoCs). Previous works relying on time-consuming simulation are not able to explore the vast design space to cope with increasing time-to-market pressure. The proposed technique gives accurate estimation results while achieving faster estimation time than cycle -accurate simulation by order of magnitude. We consider the followings for the modeling of practical memory subsystem: (1) the service time with the general distribution instead of the exponential distribution and (2) multiple-outstanding transactions to achieve high performance. The experimental results show that the proposed analysis technique has the accuracy of 94% on average and much shorter runtime ($10^5$ times faster at least) compared to simulation for the various examples: the synthetic traces and real-time application, 4-channel DVR.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2011.06d
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• pp.24-27
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• 2011

최근 스마트 폰 등 모바일 기기의 폭발적인 성장에 의해 내장 프로세서인 ARM 프로세서 기반 기기들이 활발히 개발되어 사용되고 있다. 이에 따라 상대적으로 저성능, 저 전력화에 치중하였던 내장 프로세서도 고성능화를 위한 고속 동작 및 멀티코어 프로세서를 개발하여 사용하게 되었으며, 메모리 동작 속도 역시 빠르게 발전하고 있다. 특히 모바일 기기 등에 사용 되는 저전력 메모리인 LPDDR2 소자 등의 개발에 따라 빠른 동작 속도를 가지도록 개발되고 있다. 그러나 시스템 온 칩(SoC, System on Chip) 형태로 제작되는 ARM 프로세서 기반의 SoC는 다양한 하드웨어 가속기 등을 함께 내장하고 있고, 저 전력화를 위한 버스 구조 등에 의하여 온 칩 버스의 속도 향상이 고성능 범용 시스템에 비하여 낮은 수준이다. 본 연구에서는 이러한 점을 고려하여, 프로세서 코어와 메모리 소자의 동작 속도 향상에 의하여 얻을 수 있는 성능 향상과, 상대적으로 낮은 버스 동작 속도에 의하여 저하되는 성능의 정도를 분석하고 이를 극복하기 위한 방안을 검토하였다.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2008.06b
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• pp.405-410
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• 2008

성능 / 에너지를 강조하는 현재의 멀티코어 추세에서 임베디드 시스템에 사용되는 대부분의 프로세서들은 단일 프로세서와 메모리를 버스 형태로 연결하여 구현하였다. 하지만 칩 내부의 프로세서 코어 수가 증가 하게 되면, 기존 버스 형태의 구조는 제한된 대역폭으로 인하여 확장성이 제약된다. 본 논문에서는 멀티코어 프로세서에서 사용 가능한 기존 연결 망 구조들을 분석하고, 기존 계층적 링 구조에서의 지연 시간 문제를 극복하여 성능을 개선할 수 있는 새로운 이중 광역 계층 링 구조를 제안한다.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.48 no.8
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• pp.33-44
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• 2011

In this paper, we presents a hybrid on-chip bus architecture based on the AMBA 3.0 AXI protocol for MPSoC with high performance and low power. Among AXI channels, data channels with a lot of traffic are designed by crossbar-switch architecture for massively parallel processing. On the other hand, addressing and write-response channels having a few of traffic is handled by shared-bus architecture due to the overheads of (areas, interconnection wires and power consumption) reduction. In experiments, the comparisons are carried out in terms of time, space and power domains for the verification of proposed hybrid on-chip bus architecture. For $16{\times}16$ bus configuration, the hybrid on-chip bus architecture has almost similar performance in time domain with respect to crossbar on-chip bus architecture, as the masters's latency is differenced about 9% and the total execution time is only about 4%. Furthermore, the hybrid on-chip bus architecture is very effective on the overhead reduction, such as it reduced about 47% of areas, and about 52% of interconnection wires, as well as about 66% of dynamic power consumption. Thus, the presented hybrid on-chip bus architecture is shown to be very effective for the MPSoC interconnection design aiming at high performance and low power.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.55-67
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• 2005

Separation between computation and communication in system design allows the system designer to explore the communication architecture independently of component selection and mapping. In this paper we present an iterative two-step exploration methodology for bus-based on-chip communication architecture and memory allocation, assuming that memory traces from the processing elements are given from the mapping stage. The proposed method uses a static performance estimation technique to reduce the large design space drastically and quickly, and applies a trace-driven simulation technique to the reduced set of design candidates for accurate Performance estimation. Since local memory traffics as well as shared memory traffics are involved in bus contention, memory allocation is considered as an important axis of the design space in our technique. The viability and efficiency of the proposed methodology arc validated by two real -life examples, 4-channel digital video recorder (DVR) and an equalizer for OFDM DVB-T receiver.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.68-75
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• 2016

As the number of cores and IPs increase in multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC), network-on-chip (NoC) has emerged as a promising novel interconnection architecture for its parallelism and scalability. However, minimization of the latency in NoC with legacy bus IPs must be addressed. In this paper, we focus on the latency minimization problem in NoC which accommodates legacy bus protocol based IPs considering the trade-offs between hop counts and path collisions. To resolve this problem, we propose separated address/data network for independent address and data phases of bus protocol. Compared to Mesh and irregular topologies generated by TopGen, experimental results show that average latency and execution time are reduced by 19.46% and 10.55%, respectively.