Run-time adaptive on-chip communication scheme

During run-time varying workloads and/or constraints in embedded systems require run-time adaptivity to provide a high degree of efficiency during any operation mode/scenario. Design time decisions can often only cover certain scenarios and fail in efficiency when hard-to-predict system scenarios occur. We are presenting the first approach of an adaptive on-chip communication scheme. It provides an adaptive routing/path allocation algorithm to meet a required level of QoS (guaranteed bandwidth). In our architecture adaptive runtime links are established by re-assigning buffer blocks on-demand. This adaptive buffer allocation scheme increases the buffer utilization and decreases the overall buffer use on an average of 42% in our case study analysis compared to a fixed buffer assignment strategy. The area overhead introduced by the adaptive scheme can be traded-off against the flexibility in order to select an available path and on-demand buffer allocation. We demonstrate the advantage by using various real world digital media applications and compare our approach to the state-of-the-art static on-chip communication schemes.