A Bandwidth Control Arbitration for SoC Interconnections Performing Applications with Task Dependencies

A Bandwidth Control Arbitration for SoC Interconnections Performing Applications with Task Dependencies

Blog Article

Current System-on-Chips (SoCs) execute applications with task dependency that compete for shared resources such as buses, memories, and accelerators.In such a Terminal Barriers structure, the arbitration policy becomes a critical part of the system to guarantee access and bandwidth suitable for the competing applications.Some strategies proposed in the literature to cope with these issues are Round-Robin, Weighted Round-Robin, Lottery, Time Division Access Multiplexing (TDMA), and combinations.However, a fine-grained bandwidth control arbitration policy is missing from the literature.We propose an innovative arbitration policy based on opportunistic access and a supervised utilization of the bus in terms of transmitted flits (transmission units) that settle the access and fine-grained control.

In our proposal, every competing element has a budget.Opportunistic access grants the bus to request even if the component has spent all its flits.Supervised debt accounts a record for every transmitted flit when it has no flits to spend.Our proposal applies to interconnection systems such as buses, switches, and routers.The presented approach achieves deadlock-free behavior even with task dependency applications in the ORG SHIRITAKI SPAGHETTI W/OAT FIBRE scenarios analyzed through cycle-accurate simulation models.

The synergy between opportunistic and supervised debt techniques outperforms Lottery, TDMA, and Weighted Round-Robin in terms of bandwidth control in the experimental studies performed.