Research Article Open Access

Bus Matrix Synthesis Based On Steiner Graphs for Power Efficient System on Chip Communications

Abstract

Power consumption of system level on chip communications is becoming more significant in the overall system on chip power as technology scales down. High bandwidth is desired to enhance parallelism for better performance, and the power efficiency on this bandwidth is critical to the overall SoC power consumption. Current bus architectures such as AMBA, Core connect, and Avalon are convenient for designers but not efficient on power. This paper proposes a physical synthesis scheme for on chip buses and bus matrices to minimize the power consumption, without changing the interface or arbitration protocols. By using a bus gating technique, data transactions can take shortest paths on chip, reducing the power consumption of bus wires to minimal. Routing resource and bandwidth capacity are also optimized by the construction of a shortest-path Steiner graph, wire sharing among multiple data transactions, and wire reduction heuristics on the Steiner graph. In this paper, we optimize on-chip bus communications on the tradeoffs between minimal power, maximal bandwidth, and minimal total wire length. Based on AMBA protocols, we modify the bus structure using a “bus gating” technique, and apply optimizations which are biased toward minimal power, but also favor bandwidth and routing resource.

M.Jasmin

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