Abstract
We propose a network-on-chip (NoC)-based whole system design, whose communication architecture is compatible with the advanced microcontroller bus architecture advanced extensible interface 4 (AXI4) protocol and supports high-performance multiple quality-of-service (QoS) schemes. In our system, the network interface (NI) between the NoC and the master/slave node is proposed to make the NoC architecture independent from the AXI4 protocol via message format conversion between the AXI4 signal format and the packet format, offering high flexibility to the NoC design. Besides, a QoS inheritance mechanism is applied in the slave-side NI to support QoS during packets’ round-trip transfer in the NoC. The NoC system contains time-division multiplexing (TDM) and virtual channel (VC) subnetworks to apply multiple QoS schemes to AXI4 signals with different QoS tags, and the NI is responsible for signals distribution between two subnetworks. Besides, a traffic converter is proposed in each NI to balance the traffic between the two subnetworks when necessary. The experimental results show that our proposed architecture ensures a high-throughput and low-latency NoC system. By applying the traffic converter, the packet latency can be improved.
Highlights
Advanced eXtensible Interface 4 (AXI4) is the fourth generation of the Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) interface specification from ARM which supports high-performance, high-frequency system designs [1]
None of them show the details in the network interface (NI) between the NoC and the master/slave node, which should have included the description of the NI architecture and the message format conversion between the AXI4 signal format in the master/slave node and the packet format in the NoC
WORK In this paper, we build up a NoC-based communication system to support both AMBA AXI4 protocol and three different QoS schemes
Summary
Advanced eXtensible Interface 4 (AXI4) is the fourth generation of the Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) interface specification from ARM which supports high-performance, high-frequency system designs [1]. In [17], the authors implement the AXI protocol on the 3D System-on-Chips (SoCs) to allow high-performance communication and scalability of design In this aspect, most works focus on satisfying the transactions’ ordering requirements of AXI4, but they did not consider the signal format conversion between the AXI4 protocol and the NoC protocol. This should be the most important part to adapt the AXI4 protocol in a NoC-based communication architecture They did not mention the support of different QoS schemes in NoC, which could be required in many application scenarios, for example, the baseband processing in the 5G station [18] [19]
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