• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.71-81
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a novel Globally Asynchronous, Locally Dynamic System(GALDS) bus and demonstrate its performance. The proposed GALDS bus is the bidirectional multitasking bus with the segmented bus architecture supporting the concurrent operation of multi-masters and multi-slaves. By analyzing system tasks, the bus architecture chooses the optimal frequency for each If among multiples of bus frequency and thus we can reduce the overall power consumption. For efficient data communications between IPs operating in different frequencies, we designed an asynchronous and bidirectional FIFO based on an asynchronous wrapper with hand-shaking interface. In addition, since systems can be easily expandable by inserting bus segments, the proposed architecture has advantages in IP reusability and structural flexibility As a test example, a four-segment bus haying four masters and four slaves were designed by using Verilog HDL. We demonstrate multitasking operations with read/write data transfers by simulation when the ratios of operation frequency are 1:1, 1:2, 1:4 and 1:8. The data transfer mode is a 16 burst increment mode compatible with Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture(AMBA). The maximum operation latency of the proposed GALDS bus is 22 clock cycles for the bus write operation, and 44 clock cycles for read.