• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.11_12
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• pp.629-638
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• 2005

In the System on a Chip design, the on chip bus is one of the critical factors that decides the overall system performance. Especially, in the case or reusing the IPs such as processors, DSPs and multimedia IPs that requires higher bandwidth, the bandwidth problems of on chip bus are getting more serious. Recently ARM proposes the Multi-Layer AHB BusMatrix that is a highly efficient on chip bus to solve the bandwidth problems. The Multi-Layer AHB BusMatrix allows parallel access paths between multiple masters and slaves in a system. This is achieved by using a more complex interconnection matrix and gives the benefit of increased overall bus bandwidth, and a more flexible system architecture. However, there is one clock cycle delay for each master in existing Multi-Layer AHB BusMatrix whenever the master starts new transactions or changes the slave layers because of the Input Stage and arbitration logic realized with Moore type. In this paper, we improved the existing Multi-Layer AHB BusMatrix architecture to solve the one clock cycle delay problems and to reduce the area overhead of the Input Stage. With the elimination of the Input Stage and some restrictions on the arbitration scheme, we tan take away the one clock cycle delay and reduce the area overhead. Experimental results show that the end time of total bus transaction and the average latency time of improved Multi-Layer AHB BusMatrix are improved by $20\%\;and\;24\%$ respectively. in ease of executing a number of transactions by 4-beat incrementing burst type. Besides the total area and the clock period are reduced by $22\%\;and\;29\%$ respectively, compared with existing Multi-layer AHB BusMatrix.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.397-400
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• 2006

The multi-layer advanced high-performance bus (ML-AHB) BusMatrix proposed by ARM is an excellent architecture for applying embedded systems with low power. However, there is one clock cycle delay for each master in the ML-AHB BusMatrix of the advanced microcontroller bus architecture (AMBA) design kit (ADK) whenever a master starts new transactions or changes the slave layers. In this letter, we propose an improved design method to remove the one clock cycle delay in the ML-AHB BusMatrix of an ADK. We also remarkably reduce the total area and power consumption of the ML-AHB BusMatrix of an ADK with the elimination of the heavy input stages.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.553-555
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• 2004

SoC 분야에서 온 칩 버스는 전체 시스템의 성능을 결정하는 중요한 요소이다. 이에 따라 최근 ARM 사에서는 고성능 온 칩 버스 구조인 ML(Multi-Layer) AHB 버스를 제안하였다. ML AHB 버스는 저전력 임베디드 시스템에 적합한 버스 구조로써 현재 널리 사용되고 있다. 하지만, 고가이기 때문에 ADK(AMBA$^{TM}$ Design kit) 구매에 대한 부담이 적지 않다. 본 논문은 ML AHB의 버스 구조인 버스 매트릭스 구현 및 ADK에서 제공되지 않는 테스트 환경 즉, Protocol Checker 및 Performance Monitor Module 구현에 관한 것이다.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.34 no.5_6
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• pp.257-266
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• 2007

In On-Chip bus, the arbitration scheme is one of the critical factors that decide the overall system performance. The arbitration scheme used in traditional shared bus is the master-side arbitration based on the request and grant signals between multiple masters and single arbiter. In the case of the master-side arbitration, only one master and one slave can transfer the data at a time. Therefore the throughput of total bus system and the utilization of resources are decreased in the master-side arbitration. However in the slave-side arbitration, there is an arbiter at each slave port and the master just starts a transaction and waits for the slave response to proceed to the next transfer. Thus, the unit of arbitration can be a transaction or a transfer. Besides the throughput of total bus system and the utilization of resources are increased since the multiple masters can simultaneously perform transfers with independent slaves. In this paper, we implement and analyze the arbitration schemes for the Multi-Layer AHB BusMatrix based on the slave-side arbitration. We implement the slave-side arbitration schemes based on fixed priority, round robin and dynamic priority and accomplish the performance simulation to compare and analyze the performance of each arbitration scheme according to the characteristics of the master and slave. With the performance simulation, we observed that when there are few masters on critical path in a bus system, the arbitration scheme based on dynamic priority shows the maximum performance and in other cases, the arbitration scheme based on round robin shows the highest performance. In addition, the arbitration scheme with transaction based multiplexing shows higher performance than the same arbitration scheme with single transfer based switching in an application with frequent accesses to the long latency devices or memories such as SDRAM. The improvements of the arbitration scheme with transaction based multiplexing are 26%, 42% and 51%, respectively when the latency times of SDRAM are 1, 2 and 3 clock cycles.