Wrapper-based bus implementation techniques for performance improvement and cost reduction

A low-cost wrapper-based bus implementation is described that performs well in system-on-chip (SOC) designs. Novel wrapper implementation techniques are used to create wrappers without embedded data buffers. The bus uses 1) a novel slave wrapper interface that supports flow control signals, 2) a write buffer switching technique for the master wrappers to achieve good performance at a small hardware cost, 3) a novel retry management technique called slave designated retry control (SDRC) to enable slow IP core connections and a livelock avoidance scheme using the SDRC technique, and 4) a novel bit-width conversion technique using data-width converters embedded in the bus multiplexers. A CPU-based SOC designed with the proposed bus showed that these techniques can increase throughput by about 14%, and reduce read and write latencies by about 16% and 11% compared to a conventional wrapper-based bus, when running a modeled average traffic pattern for this chip. The implemented results show that these techniques can reduce the hardware costs by 28% or 50% compared with two conventional wrapper-based conversion techniques. The chip is implemented using 0.15-μm CMOS process technologies. The area for the on-chip bus is 3.3 mm² and the operation clock frequency is 200 MHz.