Addressing the system-on-a-chip interconnect woes through communication-based design

• Published in: Design Automation, 2001 Proceedings pp. 667 - 672
• Main Authors: Sgroi, M., Sheets, M., Mihal, A., Keutzer, K., Malik, S., Rabaey, J., Sangiovanni-Vencentelli, A.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 01.01.2001; IEEE
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Applied computing > Physical sciences and engineering > Electronics; Applied computing > Physical sciences and engineering > Engineering; Clocks; Computer systems organization > Architectures > Parallel architectures > Interconnection architectures; Computer systems organization > Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks; Digital signal processing; General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques > Performance; Hardware > Integrated circuits > Interconnect; Hardware > Robustness; Integrated circuit interconnections; Networks > Network performance evaluation; Networks > Network protocols; Permission; Propagation delay; Protocols; Silicon; Synchronization; System-on-a-chip; Wires; protocol stack; network-on-chip; communication-based design; platform-based design
• ISBN: 1581132972; 9781581132977
• ISSN: 0738-100X
• DOI: 10.1145/378239.379045

Communication-based design represents a formal method approach to of system-on-a-chip design that considers communication between components as important as the computations they perform. "Our network-on-chip&rdqo ; approach partitions the communication into layers to maximize reuse and provide a programmer with an abstraction of the underlying communication framework. This layered approach is cast in the structure advocated by the OSI Reference network model and is demonstrated with a reconfigurable DSP example. The Metropolis methodology of deriving layers through a sequence of successive adaptation steps between incompatible behaviors refinement of communication is illustrated through the Intercom a design example. In another approach, MESCAL provides a designer with tools for a correct-by-construction protocol stack.