Supporting QoS in AXI4 Based Communication Architecture
Boqian Wang, Zhonghai Lu · 2020
In this paper, we propose a NoC based whole system design, the communication architecture of which is compatible with the AMBA AXI4 protocol and supports high-performance multiple QoS schemes. In our system, the network interface (NI) between the NoC and the master/slave node is proposed to make the NoC architecture independent from the AXI4 protocol via message format conversion between the AXI4 signal format and the packet format, offering high flexibility to the NoC design. Besides, a QoS inheritance mechanism is applied in the slave-side NI to support QoS during packets' round-trip transfer in the NoC. The NoC system contains TDM and VC subnetworks to apply multiple QoS schemes to AXI4 signals with different QoS tags and the NI is responsible for traffic distribution between two subnetworks. The experimental results show that our proposed system architecture can achieve good performance and satisfy different QoS needs.