An interconnect channel design methodology for high performance integrated circuits

Abstract

On-chip communication is becoming a bottleneck for high performance designs. Conventional interconnect design methodology does not account for architectures and/or communication schemes that require storage buffers (first-in-first-out queues or FIFOs) in the interconnect channel. For example, FIFOs and flow-control are needed for Network-on-Chip, high performance ASICs and multiple clock domain designs. These IC implementation architectures require an efficient methodology to determine the size of the FIFOs in the channel since the FIFO sizes affect system performance. In this work we devised a methodology to size the FIFOs in an interconnect channel containing one or more FIFOs connected in series. We show that the sizing of the FIFOs in the channel is a function of system parameters such as data production rate and consumption rate, data burstiness, number of channel stages etc. and we also quantify their effect on performance. For a single clock design, we have developed an efficient algorithm which reduces the search space for the optimal sizing of the FIFOs in the channel.