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- Zimmer, Heiko, et al.
(författare)
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Error-tolerant Interconnect Schemes
- 2005
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Ingår i: Interconnect-Centric Design for Advanced SoC and NoC. - Boston : Springer. - 9781402078354 - 9781402078361 ; , s. 155-176
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Network-on-Chip paradigm targets future Systems-on-Chip built of a large number of reusable, independent Intellectual-Property-blocks (IPs). A typical approach is to align these IPs as tiles in a regular manner, each associated with a wrapper providing access to the on-chip network. The network itself is a regular structure composed of switches/routers and the interconnecting links. The objective of implementing a Network-on-Chip is to decouple computation from communication by offering a uniform, reliable, and versatile communication platform for all the inter-IP communication required by a typical SoC application. Thus, the need for custom wiring to build an application-specific communication infrastructure is overcome. Furthermore, placement and routing are simplified for the whole NoC because both the IPs and the network components are encapsulated from one another except for a defined network interface providing network access in terms of services usable by the IP for all communication it requires with its surroundings. To fully exploit the advantages this approach offers, the network must provide defined, reliable communication services to the resources attached to it. This problem is far from trivial since the network links will most likely not be error-free in future deep submicron technology generations. While much work is done to develop robust transmission schemes, it is expected that especially crosstalk will seriously affect interconnect reliability. When the physical layer of an on-chip network fails despite all preventive measures taken, the effect should be controlled. This is what the error-tolerant interconnect schemes provide: They increase the network reliability and hide imperfections from the applications which use the communication services offered. Reliable network services are of great importance since applications have demands on communication that must be fulfilled to achieve correct application behaviour. In a classical approach, the communication infrastructure of a SoC is a combination of shared buses and custom designed interconnect to meet specific requirements. However, when all communication should be transported over a common medium, the on-chip network, it must be taken into account that the demands are different for different applications and may include bandwidth guarantees, integrity requirements or deadlines for completion of a specific task in real-time applications. Typically, an application running on a SoC is comprised of multiple processes associated to different NoC-resources. Naturally, the characteristics of data transport within one application are not uniform since different traffic types such as control messages, audio signals and video streams have to coexist. Even seemingly regular data streams become irregular during processing. For instance video streams are usually encoded such that only the delta between frames are transmitted, which makes the communicated data volume higly dependent on the video content. Closing the gap between the hardware platform's possibilities and the applications' requirements is the demanding task of error-tolerant interconnect schemes. Their aim is to provide a network with defined properties to the application. In the ideal case, what the applications see is an error-free communication medium fulfilling all their communication needs. Furthermore, this idea hides the physical implementation details of a specific technology. By providing defined services, the border between platform design (technology, layout, error-tolerant interconnect scheme) and application design (using communication at defined QoS-levels) is clear. Whichmeasures are taken to implement an error-tolerant interconnect scheme depends on the specific applications' requirements and the constraints imposed by the selected platform/architecture. Therefore, we give a general overview before focusing on one specific example.
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