Single-chip programmable platform for system-on-a-chip design

Abstract

Today’s embedded systems design culture produces custom products from scratch. However, as electronic products become more complex and global competition demands shorter time to market, the industry is moving toward a design process that integrates commodity system-on-chip (SoC) platforms. This paper presents a rigorous methodology for platform-based software-centric design a two generation of single-chip programmable platform for the proposed design methodology. The first-generation platform (SPP) includes a 32-bit multithreaded RISC processor (MT-RISC), configurable logic clusters (CLCs), programmable FIFO memories, control circuitry, and on-chip memories. For rapid thread switch, a multithreaded processor equipped with a hardware thread scheduling unit is adopted, and configurable logics are grouped into clusters for IP-based design. By integrating both the multithreaded processor and the configurable logic on a single-chip, high-level language-based designs can be easily accommodated by performing the complex and concurrent functions of a target chip on the multithreaded processor and implementing the external interface functions into the configurable logic clusters. A 64-mm2 prototype chip integrating a four-threaded MT-RISC, three CLCs, and programmable FIFOs, and 8-KB on-chip memories is fabricated in a 0.35-mm CMOS technology with four metal layers, which operates at 100-MHz clock frequency and consumes 370mW at 3.3-V power supply. The second-generation platform (SPPA) includes a 32-bit multithreaded RISC processor (MT-RISC2), hardware RTOS support, SIMD processors, IO processors, DMA controller and on-chip memories. While the SPP provides the basic features of the real-time OS, SPPA accommodates nearly full features of a commercial real-time OS including scheduling, various inter-task communication method. SPPA employs a single-chip multi-processor architecture containing an array of SIMD processors and IO processors. SIMD instructions nearly doubl...