Addressing the System-on-a-Chip Interconnect Woes Through Communication-Based Design

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

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Marco Sgroi, Michael Sheets, Andrew Mihal, Kurt Keutzer, Sharad Malik, Jan M. Rabaey, Alberto L. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli
• Keywords: DAC 2001, Design Automation, Intercom Design Example, Protocol Stack, Reconfigurable Dsp Example