|Publication number||US8171186 B1|
|Application number||US 13/017,824|
|Publication date||May 1, 2012|
|Filing date||Jan 31, 2011|
|Priority date||Jan 31, 2011|
|Publication number||017824, 13017824, US 8171186 B1, US 8171186B1, US-B1-8171186, US8171186 B1, US8171186B1|
|Inventors||Brian Jason Karguth, Denis Roland Beaudoin, Akila Subramaniam|
|Original Assignee||Texas Instruments Incorporated|
|Export Citation||BiBTeX, EndNote, RefMan|
|Patent Citations (9), Referenced by (10), Classifications (9), Legal Events (2)|
|External Links: USPTO, USPTO Assignment, Espacenet|
This invention generally relates to a network of data buses and bridges, and in particular, to networks on a chip.
Multiprocessor system-on-chip (SOC) platforms are emerging as an important trend for SOC design. Power and wire design constraints are forcing the adoption of new design methodologies for system-on-chip, namely, those that incorporate modularity and explicit parallelism. Interconnect fabrics, such as networks-on-chip (NoC), may be used to interconnect the multiple processors and other devices included within the SOC. These communication-centric interconnect fabrics are characterized by different trade-offs with regard to latency, throughput, energy dissipation, and silicon area requirements.
Examples of interconnect fabrics that may be used within an SOC include: ARM Inc's AMBA (Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture) that defines a multilevel busing system including an AHB (advanced host bus) system bus and an APB (advanced peripheral bus) lower-level peripheral bus; Sonics Inc's proprietary OCP bus, IBM's CoreConnect, Silicore's Wishbone, and Texas Instruments' Common Bus Architecture (CBA).
Most standard bus interfaces claim to support ‘precise’ bursts, meaning that the length of a transaction can be encoded in the interface signaling at the beginning of a transaction. For standard buses which allow master inserted wait states, a bridge simply implements store and forward or passes the wait states on to the destination side of the bridge.
Particular embodiments in accordance with the invention will now be described, by way of example only, and with reference to the accompanying drawings:
Specific embodiments of the invention will now be described in detail with reference to the accompanying figures. Like elements in the various figures are denoted by like reference numerals for consistency. In the following detailed description of embodiments of the invention, numerous specific details are set forth in order to provide a more thorough understanding of the invention. However, it will be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art that the invention may be practiced without these specific details. In other instances, well-known features have not been described in detail to avoid unnecessarily complicating the description.
As mentioned earlier, most standard bus interfaces claim to support ‘precise’ bursts, meaning that the length of a transaction can be encoded in the interface signaling at the beginning of a transaction. However, a problem for bridges within an interconnect fabric is that write transactions are not truly precise from a cut-through bridging perspective unless it is also known whether or not there will be any master inserted wait states.
The use of on-chip bus interfaces which allow the master side of the interface to insert wait states on writes may disrupt the natural processing pipeline of certain types of slave attached peripherals, such as an external memory interface (EMIF), peripheral component interconnect (PCI), etc. These disruptions in the pipeline can require a store and forward type buffer to be placed directly in front of the slave peripheral resulting in higher latency and larger area.
Most standard bus interfaces allow master inserted wait states during burst transactions. By using an attribute which travels as a signal along with the transaction it is possible to indicate whether or not each individual transaction will in fact include any master inserted wait states on writes. By modulating this attribute appropriately, it is possible to create systems which completely adhere to the bus standards but which require far less buffering and exhibit lower latency due to cut-through type bridging implemented within the interconnect.
For example, a single bit attribute signal may indicate whether a master inserted wait state may or will not occur during the burst transaction. All endpoint masters in the system would be encouraged to always output transactions without inserting wait states on writes. As a transaction flows from the endpoint master toward the endpoint slave through the interconnect, this attribute may be modulated accordingly by the infrastructure. In some cases it may be advantageous to insert master wait states at a certain node in the interconnect fabric. In these cases, the node bridge would set the wait state attribute to indicate master inserted wait states may occur as the transaction passes through the node.
In other cases, it may be advantageous to have a shared store and forward type buffer which accumulates the write data phases and reconstitutes a wait state free burst. In these cases, the node bridge would set the wait state attribute to indicate no master inserted wait states will occur as the transaction passes through. At any point in the system where this attribute is set, writes will be considered truly precise and optimal cut-through type bridging may be supported.
Performance and area improvements may be achieved when cut-though is enabled. Previous bus interface technologies did not allow masters to insert wait states. Embodiments of this invention allow similar type efficiencies during write transactions while operating across a standard bus interface that does allow master inserted wait states. Write latency is typically not considered by many system architects but due to head of line blocking, it is a critical factor in read latency since the write in many cases must be completed before a read can be processed.
Embodiments of the invention allow an endpoint slave device to perform to its full potential by helping to eliminate a source of ‘bubbles’ in the transaction processing pipe.
A bridge 120 couples bus 2 to bus 1. Bridge interface 121 connects to the address, data, and control signal lines of bus 1, while bridge interface 122 connects to the address, data, and control signal lines of bus 2. Control logic 123 within bridge 120 controls and coordinates the operation of bridge interfaces 121, 122. A buffer 124 may be coupled to bridge interfaces 121, 122 and controlled by control logic 123 to provide store and forward buffering, as will be described in more detail below.
Note that the block diagram is only intended to illustrate generic network fabric concepts and does not show all of the system components such as an arbiter, decoder etc. In this embodiment, bus 1 may support 32, 64, or 128-bit data-bus implementations with a fixed 32-bit address bus. It is a synchronous bus that supports bursts and pipelining of accesses to improve throughput. Bus 2 is a similar bus that supports burst transactions. Bridge interface 121 acts a slave to transactions generated by the master devices on bus 1. Bridge interface 122 then acts as a master on bus 2 in response to transactions received from bus 1 that are destined for slave devices on bus 2.
Bus 1 and bus 2 may operate at different clock rates. Bus 1 supports multiple masters. Various embodiments may use a central arbiter or a distributed arbitration system. The arbiter has the task of determining which master gets to do an access. Every transfer has an address/control phase and a separate data phase. They're both pipelined which allows a master to start the next transfer's arbitration and address phase while finishing the current transfer. The address transfer is always followed by the data phase. In this embodiment, separate uni-directional buses for read and write are used. A slave (memory or peripheral device which accepts a read or write request from a master) may prolong the transfer (add wait states) using a “slave not ready” signal. Similarly, a master may prolong the transfer (add wait states) using a “master not ready” signal.
Both buses support bursts, which can either be of undefined-length or fixed length (4, 8 or 16 beats, for example). There is also, of course, the possibility to do a single transfer (one read or write). In various embodiments, bursts may be performed to a fixed address, such as for FIFO access, increment addresses (in steps of a single increment equal to the size of the access) or wrap where a critical word within a cache line is accessed first. The address from a master may be decoded by a central address decoder that provides a select signal to one of the slaves. Other embodiments may have different types of address decoding, etc.
A master inserted wait state (MIWS) attribute is also transferred during the address/command phase. The MIWS attribute indicates whether a master inserted wait state may or will not occur during the burst transaction. The master may be implemented in such a fashion that it is always known that it will never insert a master inserted wait state. In that case, the MIWS attribute will always by negative for such a master; each write transfer that it initiates will therefore include a MIWS attribute indicating that a master inserted wait state will not occur during the transaction. Referring back to
Conversely, for some masters it is known that they may always insert a wait state during a transaction. This may be due to the fact that the source of the write data cannot be accessed by the master fast enough to keep up with the bus burst transfer rate. In that case, the MIWS attribute will always by positive for such a master; each write transfer that it initiates will therefore include a MIWS attribute indicating that a master inserted wait state may occur during the transaction. Referring back to
For some masters, it is not known ahead of time whether a master inserted wait state may or will not occur during the burst transaction, because different transactions may have different sources of write data. When transferring from one source, the transaction may be accomplished without master inserted wait states, while when transferring from another source master inserted wait states may be needed. In that case, a control function in the master will determine if the block of data can be transferred by the master without incurring a master inserted wait state prior to initiating each burst transaction and the MIWS attribute will be set accordingly on a transaction by transaction basis. Referring back to
Alternatively, when the received MIWS attribute is positive and indicates a master inserted wait state may occur, the bridge may initiate a respective transaction and simply pass the positive MIWS through and insert master wait states until data for each data phase is available. In this manner, the initiation of the burst is not delayed significantly, but the bridge may need to insert master wait states in the resulting slave side burst transaction.
Bridge-A 420 couples bus 2 to bus 1. Bridge-B couples bus 2 to bus 3. Bridge-C couples bus 3 to bus 4. Each bridge may be implemented to operate in a similar manner as bridge 120 of
Note that the block diagram is only intended to illustrate generic network fabric concepts and does not show all of the system components such as an arbiter, decoder etc. In this embodiment, bus 1 supports 32, 64, or 128-bit data-bus implementations with a fixed 32-bit address bus. It is a synchronous bus that supports bursts and pipelining of accesses to improve throughput. Buses 2-4 are similar buses that also support burst transactions. Each bridge acts a slave to transactions generated by a master device on the master side bus and then acts as a master on the slave side bus in response to each received transaction.
Each of the buses may operate at different clock rates. Various embodiments may use a central arbiter or a distributed arbitration system. Every transfer has an address/control phase and a separate data phase.
A burst transaction is initiated 904 on a bus by a master coupled to the bus to transfer a block of data as a burst transaction. A master inserted wait state attribute (MIWS) is included 906 with the initiation of the burst transaction that indicates whether a master inserted wait state may or will not occur during the burst transaction. Typically, initiation of the burst transaction is a command transmitted on the bus by the master. The wait state attribute is included with the command. It may be encoded in the command, or may be a unique bit in a multi-bit command, for example. In another embodiment, the MIWS attribute may be signaled on a dedicated signal line coincident with initiation of the burst transaction. This may be the same signal line that is used to indicate wait states during data phases of the burst transaction, for example.
A bridge that is coupled to the bus receives 908 the burst transaction along with the included MIWS attribute. When the attribute is negative 910 indicating that no master inserted wait states will occur during the burst transaction, a cut-through transaction may be initiated 920 to a second bus with an associated MIWS attribute. In most cases, the slave side MIWS attribute will also be negative indicating that no master inserted wait states will occur during the slave side burst transaction. However, as described with regard to
The block of data received from the burst transaction may be buffered 930 by the bridge when the wait state attribute indicates 910 a master inserted wait state may be incurred during the burst transaction. A slave side burst transaction may then be initiated 932 on the second bus by the bridge to transfer the buffered block of data. A wait state attribute is included with the initiation of the burst transaction on the second bus that indicates a master inserted wait state will not occur during the burst transaction.
Alternatively, a slave side burst transaction may be initiated 940 on the second bus by the bridge to transfer an un-buffered block of data. A wait state attribute is included with the initiation of the burst transaction on the second bus that indicates a master inserted wait state may occur during the burst transaction.
Once the slave side burst transaction has been initiated, it will then be received 950 by a slave interface. This may be another bridge as illustrated in
RF transceiver 1006 is a digital radio processor and includes a receiver for receiving a stream of coded data frames from a cellular base station via antenna 1007 and a transmitter for transmitting a stream of coded data frames to the cellular base station via antenna 1007. RF transceiver 1006 is coupled to DBB 1002 which provides processing of the frames of encoded data being received and transmitted by cell phone 1000.
DBB unit 1002 may send or receive data to various devices connected to universal serial bus (USB) port 1026. DBB 1002 can be connected to subscriber identity module (SIM) card 1010 and stores and retrieves information used for making calls via the cellular system. DBB 1002 may also be connected to memory 1012 that augments the onboard memory and is used for various processing needs. DBB 1002 can be connected to Bluetooth baseband unit 1030 for wireless connection to a microphone 1032 a and headset 1032 b for sending and receiving voice data. DBB 1002 can also be connected to display 1020 and can send information to it for interaction with a user of the mobile UE 1000 during a call process. Touch screen 1021 may be connected to DBB 1002 for haptic feedback. Display 1020 may also display pictures received from the network, from a local camera 1028, or from other sources such as USB 1026. DBB 1002 may also send a video stream to display 1020 that is received from various sources such as the cellular network via RF transceiver 1006 or camera 1028. DBB 1002 may also send a video stream to an external video display unit via encoder 1022 over composite output terminal 1024. Encoder unit 1022 can provide encoding according to PAL/SECAM/NTSC video standards. In some embodiments, audio codec 1009 receives an audio stream from FM Radio tuner 1008 and sends an audio stream to stereo headset 1016 and/or stereo speakers 1018. In other embodiments, there may be other sources of an audio stream, such a compact disc (CD) player, a solid state memory module, etc.
Although the invention finds particular application to systems on a chip (SOC) that may include multiple processors and embedded memory, it also finds application to other forms of SOC. The SOC may have just a single processor, or no processor. The SOC may have a large internal memory, or no internal memory subsystems. An SOC may contain one or more modules which each include custom designed functional circuits combined with pre-designed functional circuits provided by a design library.
While the invention has been described with reference to illustrative embodiments, this description is not intended to be construed in a limiting sense. Various other embodiments of the invention will be apparent to persons skilled in the art upon reference to this description. For example, the on-chip fabric may be more complex than the simple linear arrangements illustrated herein. The fabric may have a ring topology or a star topology, for example. A bridge may have more than two interfaces, in which case the concepts described herein may be applied to any set of interfaces that interact for any given bridged transaction.
While the invention has been described with reference to on-chip interconnect fabrics, embodiments of the invention may also be applied to multichip systems in which bridges or buses couple the multiple chips.
The buses described herein are illustrative. Other embodiments may utilize buses having bit widths and configurations that differ from the bus configurations described herein. Bus signaling may utilize metallic conductors, optical conductors, infrared conduction, or other later discovered conduction technology, for example.
Certain terms are used throughout the description and the claims to refer to particular system components. As one skilled in the art will appreciate, components in digital systems may be referred to by different names and/or may be combined in ways not shown herein without departing from the described functionality. This document does not intend to distinguish between components that differ in name but not function. In the discussion and in the claims, the terms “including” and “comprising” are used in an open-ended fashion, and thus should be interpreted to mean “including, but not limited to . . . ” Also, the term “couple” and derivatives thereof are intended to mean an indirect, direct, optical, and/or wireless electrical connection. Thus, if a first device couples to a second device, that connection may be through a direct electrical connection, through an indirect electrical connection via other devices and connections, through an optical electrical connection, and/or through a wireless electrical connection.
Although method steps may be presented and described herein in a sequential fashion, one or more of the steps shown and described may be omitted, repeated, performed concurrently, and/or performed in a different order than the order shown in the figures and/or described herein. Accordingly, embodiments of the invention should not be considered limited to the specific ordering of steps shown in the figures and/or described herein.
It is therefore contemplated that the appended claims will cover any such modifications of the embodiments as fall within the true scope and spirit of the invention.
|Cited Patent||Filing date||Publication date||Applicant||Title|
|US4954950 *||Sep 17, 1986||Sep 4, 1990||International Business Machines Corporation||Terminal communications circuit|
|US5255375 *||Jan 10, 1992||Oct 19, 1993||Digital Equipment Corporation||High performance interface between an asynchronous bus and one or more processors or the like|
|US5506995 *||May 20, 1993||Apr 9, 1996||Mitsubishi Denki Kabushiki Kaisha||Bus master for selectively disconnecting/connecting a first bus to and from a second bus in response to an acquisition request|
|US5732250 *||Jan 20, 1997||Mar 24, 1998||Intel Corporation||Multi-function microprocessor wait state mechanism using external control line|
|US5752002 *||Jun 12, 1995||May 12, 1998||Sand Microelectronics, Inc.||Method and apparatus for performance optimization of integrated circuit designs|
|US5777942 *||Nov 8, 1993||Jul 7, 1998||Mitsubishi Denki Kabushiki Kaisha||Semiconductor memory device including dynamic type memory and static type memory formed on the common chip and an operating method thereof|
|US6085261 *||Jul 29, 1996||Jul 4, 2000||Motorola, Inc.||Method and apparatus for burst protocol in a data processing system|
|US20030200359 *||Apr 22, 2002||Oct 23, 2003||Fernald Kenneth W.||Serial data interface|
|US20040098549 *||Oct 4, 2001||May 20, 2004||Dorst Jeffrey R.||Apparatus and methods for programmable interfaces in memory controllers|
|Citing Patent||Filing date||Publication date||Applicant||Title|
|US8489791||Dec 28, 2010||Jul 16, 2013||Lsi Corporation||Processor bus bridge security feature for network processors or the like|
|US8489792||Dec 28, 2010||Jul 16, 2013||Lsi Corporation||Transaction performance monitoring in a processor bus bridge|
|US8489794 *||Dec 28, 2010||Jul 16, 2013||Lsi Corporation||Processor bus bridge for network processors or the like|
|US8843687 *||May 16, 2012||Sep 23, 2014||Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba||Semiconductor device controlling outbound and inbound path switching sections based on a setting state and controlling method thereof|
|US8923315||Feb 26, 2013||Dec 30, 2014||Lsi Corporation||Packet router having a hierarchical buffer structure|
|US8949500 *||Mar 1, 2012||Feb 3, 2015||Lsi Corporation||Non-blocking processor bus bridge for network processors or the like|
|US20110225334 *||Sep 15, 2011||Byrne Richard J||Processor bus bridge for network processors or the like|
|US20110225337 *||Sep 15, 2011||Byrne Richard J||Transaction performance monitoring in a processor bus bridge|
|US20130042038 *||Mar 1, 2012||Feb 14, 2013||Lsi Corporation||Non-blocking processor bus bridge for network processors or the like|
|US20130151742 *||May 16, 2012||Jun 13, 2013||Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba||Semiconductor device and controlling method thereof|
|U.S. Classification||710/35, 710/110, 710/311, 710/58, 710/25|
|International Classification||G06F13/00, G06F13/36|
|Mar 1, 2011||AS||Assignment|
Owner name: TEXAS INSTRUMENTS INCORPORATED, TEXAS
Free format text: ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST;ASSIGNORS:KARGUTH, BRIAN JASON;BEAUDOIN, DENIS ROLAND;SUBRAMANIAM,AKILA;SIGNING DATES FROM 20110225 TO 20110228;REEL/FRAME:025880/0295
|Oct 27, 2015||FPAY||Fee payment|
Year of fee payment: 4