Application-driven Development of Flexible Packet-oriented Communication Interfaces
Christian Sauer · mediaTUM – the media and publications repository of the Technical University Munich (Technical University Munich) · 2010
Today's heterogeneous SoCs deploy concurrent processing cores in increasing numbers. But their diverse IO interfaces remain dedicated non-programmable modules. Aimed at fully programmable and homogeneous platforms in network and multimedia domains, this work explores the feasibility of programmable approaches for packet-oriented IO interfaces in 3 steps: 1) Modeling and analysis of IO interfaces with respect to a common structure and elementary functions, 2) Design of a Y-chart-based methodology and a set of domain-specific tools for the application-driven development (SystemClick) and later deployment (CRACC) of flexible IO interfaces, and 3) the quantitative exploration of the programmable interface design space based on a strictly modular platform (NOVA). Case studies of PCIe, Hypertransport, RapidIO, Ethernet, and wLAN demonstrate feasibility and current limitations of a common protocol-agnostic and truly programmable implementation.