Delay Insensitive System-on-Chip Interconnect using 1-of-4 Data Encoding

  • Authors:
  • W. J. Bainbridge;S. B. Furber

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • ASYNC '01 Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

The demands of System-on-Chip (SoC) interconnect increasingly cannot be satisfied through the use of a shared bus. A common alternative, using unidirectional, point-to-point connections and multiplexers, results in much greater area requirements and still suffers from some of the same problems. This paper introduces a delay-insensitive, asynchronous approach to interconnect over long paths using 1-of-4 encoded channels switched through multiplexers. A re-implementation of the MARBLE SoC bus (as used in the AMULET3H chip) using this technique shows that it can provide a higher throughput than the simpler tristate bus while using a narrower datapath.