On-chip-network Protocol for Efficient Network Utilization

A system-on-chip (SoC) includes more functions and requires rapidly increased data bandwidth as the development of semiconductor process technology and SoC design methodology. As a result, the data bandwidth of on-chip-networks in SoCs becomes a key factor of the system performance, and the research on the on-chip-network is performed actively. Either AXI or OCP is considered to a substitute of the AHB which has been the most popular on-chip-network. However, they have much increased number of signal wires, which make it difficult to design the interface logic and the network hardware. The compatibility of the protocols with other protocols is not so good. In this paper, we propose a new interface protocol for on-chip-networks to improve the problems mentioned above. The proposed protocol uses less number of signal wires than that of the AHB and considers the compatibility with other interface protocols such as the AXI. According the analysis results, the performance of the proposed protocol per wire is much better than that of the AXI although the absolute performance is slightly inferior.