• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.9
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• pp.96-102
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• 2008

The SoC bus topology is classified to single and multiple bus systems due to bus number. In single bus system, the selected only one master among the masters that try to initiate the bus transaction can execute its data transaction. On the other hand, in multiple bus system, as several buses that can be operated independently are connected with bridge, multiple data can be transferred parallel in each bus. However, In the case of data communication from one bus system to the other, data latency has remarkably increased in multiple bus. Furthermore, the performance of multiple bus can be easily different from master number, slave type and so on. In this paper, the performance of single and multiple bus architecture is compared and quantitatively analysed with the variation of master number and slave type especially a tying SDRAM, SRAM and register with TLM simulation method.

• 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.44 no.4
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• pp.24-31
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• 2007

Up to date, a lot of bus protocol and bus architecture are released though most of them are based on the shared bus architecture and inherit the limitation of performance. SNP (SoC Network Protocol), and hence, SNA (SoC Network Architecture) which are high performance on-chip-bus protocol and architecture, respectively, have been proposed to solve the problems of the conventional shared bus. We refine the SNA specification and improve the performance and functionality. The performance of the SNA is improved by supporting simultaneous routing for bus request of multiple masters. The internal routing logic is also improved so that the gate count is decreased. The proposed SNA employs XSNP (extended SNP) that supports almost perfect compatibility with AMBA AHB protocol without performance degradation. The hardware complexity of the improved SNA is not increased much by optimizing the current routing logic. The improved SNA works for IPs with the original SNP at its best performance. In addition, it can also replace the AMBA AHB or interconnect matrix of a system, and it guarantees simultaneous multiple channels. That is, the existing AMBA system can show much improved performance by replacing the AHB or the interconnect matrix with the SNA. Thanks to the small number of interconnection wires, the SNA can be used for the off-chip bus system, too. We verify the performance and function of the proposed SNA and XSNP simulation and emulation.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.33 no.8
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• pp.554-561
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• 2006

In recent years, as SoC design research is actively conducted, a large number of IPs are included in a system. Various bus protocols and bus architectures are designed to increase IP reusability. Among them, the AMBA AHB became a de facto standard although it is somewhat inadequate for a large scale SoC. We proposed SNP and SNA, high performance on-chip-bus protocol and architecture, respectively, to solve the problem of the conventional shared buses. However, it seems to be imperative that the new on-chip-bus system support AMBA-compatible IPs for a while since there are a lot of IPs with AMBA interface. In this paper, we propose an extended SNP specification and a corresponding SNA component to support ABMA-compatible IPs used in SNA - based system. We extend the phase of the SNP by 1 bit to add new 8 phases to support communication based on AMBA protocol without penalty of elongated cycle latency. The ARB-to -XSNP converter translates the protocol between AHB and SNP to attach AMBA -compatible IPs to SNA based system. We show that AMBA IPs can communicate through SNP without any degradation of performance using the extended SNP and AHB - to- XSNP converter.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.43 no.10 s.352
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• pp.74-79
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• 2006

Test Interface Controller (TIC) provided by ARM Ltd. is widely used for functional testing of System-on-Chip (SoC) adopting Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) bus system. Accordingly, this architecture has a deficiency of not being able to concurrently shifting in and out the structural scan test patterns through the TIC and AMBA bus. This paper introduces a new AMBA based Test Access Mechanism (ATAM) for speedy testing of SoCs embedding ARM cores. While preserving the compatability with the ARM TIC, since scan in and out operations can be performed simultaneously, test application time through the expensive Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) can be drastically reduced.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.343-350
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• 2016

A secure and effective on-chip bus for detecting and preventing malicious attacks by infected IPs is presented in this paper. Most system inter-connects (on-chip bus) are vulnerable to hardware Trojan (Malware) attack because all data and control signals are routed. A proposed secure bus with modifications in arbitration, address decoding, and wrapping for bus master and slaves is designed using the Advanced High-Performance and Advance Peripheral Bus (AHB and APB Bus). It is implemented with the concept that arbiter checks share of masters and manage infected masters and slaves in every transaction. The proposed hardware is designed with the Xilinx 14.7 ISE and verified using the HBE-SoC-IPD test board equipped with Virtex4 XC4VLX80 FPGA device. The design has a total gate count of 39K at an operating frequency of 313MHz using the $0.13{\mu}m$ TSMC process.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.497-503
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• 2005

In this paper, we present a performance analysis for an MPEG-4 video codec based on the on-chip network communication architecture. The existing on-chip buses of system-on-a-chip (SoC) have some limitation on data traffic bandwidth since a large number of silicon IPs share the bus. An on-chip network is introduced to solve the problem of on-chip buses, in which the concept of a computer network is applied to the communication architecture of SoC. We compared the performance of the MPEG-4 video codec based on the on-chip network and Advanced Micro-controller Bus Architecture (AMBA) on-chip bus. Experimental results show that the performance of the MPEG-4 video codec based on the on-chip network is improved over 50% compared to the design based on a multi-layer AMBA bus.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.42 no.2 s.332
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• pp.65-72
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• 2005

We can integrate more IP blocks on a silicon die as the development of fabrication technologies and EDA tools. Consequently, we can design complicated SoC architecture including multi-processors. However, most of existing SoC buses have bottleneck in on-chip communication because of shared bus architectures, which result in the performance degradation of systems. In most cases, the performance of a multi-processor system is determined by efficient on-chip communication and the well-balanced distribution of computation rather than the performance of the processors. We propose an efficient SoC Network Architecture(SNA) using crossbar routers which provide a solution to ensure enough communication bandwidth. The SNA can significantly reduce the bottleneck of on-chip communication by providing multi-channels for multi-masters. According to the proposed architecture, we design a model system for the SNA. The proposed architecture has a better efficiency by $40\%$ than the AMBA AHB according to a simulation result.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.9
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• pp.26-32
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• 2008

The conventional shared bus architecture is capable of processing only one data transaction in same time. In this paper, we propose the NAWM (No Arbitration Wild Master) bus architecture that is capable of processing several data transactions in same time. After designing the master and the slave wrappers of NAWM bus architecture about AMBA system, we confirm that most of IPs of AMBA system can be a lied without modification and the added timing delay can be neglected. from simulation we deduce that more than 50% parallel processing is possible when several masters initiate slaves in NAWM bus architecture.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.27-35
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• 2012

In this paper, the performance analysis for multimedia video codec(MPEG-4, H.264) on on-chip network communication architecture is presented. The On-Chip Network (OCN) is the new communication architecture of multimedia SoC design that overcomes the limits of On-Chip Bus architecture by providing higher data traffic bandwidth, reusability and higher scalability. We compared the performance of MPEG-4, H.264 decoder based on-chip network and AMBA on-chip bus. Experimental results show that the performance of MPEG-4, H.264 based on on-chip network is improved over 33~56% compared to the design based on AMBA on-chip bus.