Addressing the system-on-a-chip interconnect woes through communication-based design

TLDR

Communication‑based design is a formal method for SoC design that treats communication between components as equally important as computation. The authors propose a network‑on‑chip approach that partitions communication into layers to maximize reuse and provide programmers with an abstraction of the underlying communication framework. The method implements a layered communication architecture following the OSI model, illustrated by a reconfigurable DSP and Intercom example, and includes a Metropolis‑based layer derivation process and MESCAL tools for correct‑by‑construction protocol stacks. The layered design is validated through a reconfigurable DSP and Intercom example, and MESCAL offers correct‑by‑construction protocol stack tools.

Abstract

Communication-based design represents a formal method approach to of system-on-a-chip design that considers communication between components as important as the computations they perform. "Our network-on-chip&rdqo ; approach partitions the communication into layers to maximize reuse and provide a programmer with an abstraction of the underlying communication framework. This layered approach is cast in the structure advocated by the OSI Reference network model and is demonstrated with a reconfigurable DSP example. The Metropolis methodology of deriving layers through a sequence of successive adaptation steps between incompatible behaviors refinement of communication is illustrated through the Intercom a design example. In another approach, MESCAL provides a designer with tools for a correct-by-construction protocol stack.