SOMP: Service-Oriented Multi Processors

Abstract

Multi-processor system on chip (MPSoC) has been widely applied in embedded systems design. However, it has posed great challenges in designing and implementing prototype chip for diverse applications due to different instruction set architectures (ISA), programming interfaces and software tool chains. In order to solve the problem, we introduce SOA into MPSoC design, because it can provide flexibility and extensibility for MPSoC chip design at lower cost through adopting re-usable, self-contained modules in the design process. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented multi-processor SOMP, which integrates embedded processors and hardware IP cores as computing servants on a single chip. SOMP provides unified programming interfaces for users through utilizing diverse computing resources. In order to demonstrate the performance of SOMP, we implemented it on a Digilent Virtex5LX110T FPGA board and designed several sample test applications for verification purpose. The experimental results show that SOMP can improve the parallelism greatly and achieve 95.7% of the theoretical speedup on average.