• 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.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.71-76
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• 2016

A controller area network (CAN) receiver measures differential voltage on a bus to determine the bus level. Since 3.3V transceivers generate the same differential voltage as 5V transceivers (usually ${\geq}1.5V$), all transceivers on the bus (regardless of supply voltage) can decipher the message. In fact, the other transceivers cannot even determine or show that there is anything different about the differential voltage levels. A new CMOS RC oscillator insensitive supply voltage for clock generation in a CAN transceiver was fabricated and tested to compensate for this drawback in CAN communication. The system consists of a symmetrical circuit for voltage and current switches, two capacitors, two comparators, and an RS flip-flop. The operational principle is similar to a bistable multivibrator but the oscillation frequency can also be controlled via a bias current and reference voltage. The chip test experimental results show that oscillation frequency and power dissipation are 500 kHz and 5.48 mW, respectively at a supply voltage of 3.3 V. The chip, chip area is $0.021mm^2$, is fabricated with $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS technology from SK hynix.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07b
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• pp.859-862
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• 2003

This paper proposes an emulation environment for SoC designs using small number of large gate-count FPGA's and a PC system. To overcome the pin limitation problem in partitioning the design when the design size overwhelms the FPGA gate count, we use bus splitter modules that replicate on-chip bus signals in one FPGA to arbitrary number of other FPGA's with minimal pin count. The proposed scheme is applied to the emulation of 2 million gate multimedia processing chip using two Xilinx Viretex-2 6000 FPGA devices in 6.6MHz operating frequency. An ARM core, memories, camera and LCD display are modeled in software using dual 2GHz Pentium-III processors. This scheme can be utilized for more than 2 FPGA's in the same ways as two FPGA case without losing emulation speed.

• 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 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.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.75-79
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• 2009

A system-on-a-chip communication architecture has a significant impact on the performance and power consumption of modern multi-processors system-on-chips (MPSoCs). However, customization of such architecture for a specific application requires the exploration of a large design space. Thus, system designers need tools to rapidly explore and evaluate communication architectures. In this paper we present the method for application-specific low-power bus architecture synthesis at system-level. Our paper has two contributions. First, we build a bus power model of AMBA AXI bus communication architecture. Second, we incorporate this power model into a low-power architecture exploration algorithm that enables system designers to rapidly explore the target bus architecture. The proposed exploration algorithm reduces power consumption by 20.1% compared to a maximally connected reduced matrix, and the area is also reduced by 20.2% compared to the maximally connected reduced matrix.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.745-753
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• 2016

This paper presents a fully synthesizable low power interconnect bus for millimeter-scale wireless sensor nodes. A segmented ring bus topology minimizes the required chip real estate with low input/output pad count for ultra-small form factors. By avoiding the conventional open drain-based solution, the bus can be fully synthesizable. Low power is achieved by obviating a need for local oscillators in member nodes. Also, aggressive power gating allows low-power standby mode with only 53 gates powered on. An integrated wakeup scheme is compatible with a power management unit that has nW standby mode. A 3-module system including the bus is fabricated in a 180 nm process. The entire system consumes 8 nW in standby mode, and the bus achieves 17.5 pJ/bit/chip.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2012.10a
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• pp.780-783
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• 2012

Recently, the SoC industry mainly uses various multi-layered bus architectures. However, reckless use of bus layers may results in on-chip communication resources and waste of silicon area. This paper performs a quantitative analysis to compare the two de-facto on-chip buses and SNP. Through the performance estimation, the performance of SNP turns out to be significantly enhanced for asymmetric write and read traffic (non-central F distribution) while symmetric traffic is similar to that of AXI. More specifically, SNP properly places IP cores on the top or bottom, induces the write and read channels to be balanced, and achieves about twenty percent improved performance compared to AXI.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.651-654
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• 2005

In this paper, we designed ECC(Elliptic Curve Cryptographic) Processor with Bus-splitting mothod for embedded SoC. ECC SIP is designed by VHDL RTL modeling, and implemented reusably through the procedure of logic synthesis, simulation and FPGA verification. To communicate with ARM9 core and SIP, we designed SIP bus functional model according to AMBA AHB specification. The design of ECC Processor for platform-based SoC is implemented using the design kit which is composed of many devices such as ARM9 RISC core, memory, UART, interrupt controller, FPGA and so on. We performed software design on the ARM9 core for SIP and peripherals control, memory address mapping and so on.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1998.06a
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• pp.831-834
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• 1998

This paper describes a bus interface unit which is used in a 32bit high-performance multimedia RISC CPU including DSP unit. The main idea adopted in designing is that the bus interface unit enables the processor to provide on-chip functions for controlling memory and peripheral devices, including RAS-cAS multiplexing, DRAM refresh and parity generation and checking. The number of bus cycles used for a memory or I/O access is also defined by the processor, thus, no external bus controllers are required. All memories and peripheral devices can be connected directly, pin to pin, without any glue logic. That is the key point of the design.