As part of my research I am developing an FPGA-based SoC to test my theories. Existing frameworks and buses, such as AXI and Wishbone, lacked the flexibility I required so I had to create my own.
The first step was to forgo the classic shared-bus or crossbar topology in favor of a packet-switched network-on-chip (NoC). In order to keep the routing simple I elected to use a quadtree topology, with 16-bit routing addresses, for the network. This maps well to a spatially distributed system and should permit scaling to very large SoCs (up to 65536 IP cores per SoC are theoretically possible, though FPGA gate counts limit feasible designs to much smaller)
Example quadtree (from http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/) |
Each router has four downstream and one upstream ports. When a packet arrives at a router it checks if the packet is intended for its subnet; if so the next two bits control which downstream port it is forwarded out of. If the packet belongs to another subnet, it is sent out the upstream port.
Example NoC routing topology |
If 0x8001 were instead communicating with 0x8005, the router would instead forward the message out the upstream port. The router at 0x8000/12 would check address bits 3:2, determine that the packet is destined for port 2'b01, and forward to the destination router, which would then use bits 1:0 as the selector and forward out port 2'b01 to the final destination.
The actual network topology is slightly more complex than the diagram above implies, because my framework uses two independent networks, one for bulk data transfer and one for control-plane traffic. Thus, each line in the above diagram is actually four independent one-way links; two upstream and two downstream. Each link consists of a 32-bit data bus plus a few status bits. The actual protocol used will be described in the next post in this series.
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