Robust on-chip bus architecture synthesis for MPSoCs under random tasks arrival

Abstract

Abstract-A major trend in a modern system-on-chip design is a growing system complexity, which results in a sharp increase of communication traffic on the on-chip communication bus architectures. In a real-time embedded system, task arrival rate, inter-task arrival time, and data size to be transferred are not uniform over time. This is due to the partial re-configuration of an embedded system to cope with dynamic workload. In this context, the traditional application specific bus architectures may fail to meet the real-time constraints. Thus, to incorporate the random behavior of on-chip communication, this work proposes an approach to synthesize an on-chip bus architecture, which is robust for a given distributions of random tasks. The randomness of communication tasks is characterized by three main parameters which are the average task arrival rate, the average inter-task arrival time, and the data size. For synthesis, an on-chip bus requirement is guided by the worst-case performance need, while the dynamic voltage scaling technique is used to save energy when the workload is low or timing slack is high. This, in turn, results in an effective utilization of communication resources under variable workload.