This thesis presents a real-time operating system hardware extension core which supports the integration of hardware accelerators into real-time system-on-chip designs as hardware tasks. The hardware extension core utilizes reconfigurable logic to manage synchronization events, data transfers, and hardware task control. A reduction in interrupt latency, frequency, and execution time provides performance and predictability improvements for real-time applications. Required communication between the CPU and hardware accelerators is also reduced significantly. Compared to a software implementation, synthetic benchmarks of common synchronization tasks show up to a 41% increase in synchronization performance. Analysis of a test case design for audio encoding and encryption using three hardware accelerators shows results of a 2.89x throughput improvement in comparison to the use of software device driver tasks. Overall, this design simplifies the integration of hardware accelerators into real-time system-on-chip designs while improving the performance and predictability of these systems.

Network topologies play a vital role in chip design; they largely determine the cost of the network and significantly impact performance in many-core architectures. We propose a novel set of on-chip networks, dodecs, and illustrate how they reduce network diameter with randomized low-radix router connections. In addition, we design an adaptive routing algorithm for dodec networks to achieve high throughput. By introducing randomness, dodec networks exhibit more uniform message latency. By using low-radix routers, dodec networks simplify the router microarchitecture and attain 20% area and 22% power reduction compared to mesh routers while delivering the same overall application performance for PARSEC. We compare our dodec network to alternative low-radix network topologies and show that at the same cost, dodec networks increase the throughput up to 50% while reducing average latency by 10% compared to a mesh.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors projects that embedded memories will occupy increasing System-on-Chip area. The growing density of integration increases the likelihood of fabrication faults. The proposed memory repair strategy employs forward error correction at the system level and mitigates the impact of memory faults through permutation of high sensitivity regions. The effectiveness of the proposed repair technique is demonstrated on a 19.4-Mbit de-interleaver SRAM memory of an ISDB-T digital baseband OFDM receiver in 65-nm CMOS. The proposed technique introduces a single multiplexer delay overhead and a configurable area overhead of M/i bits, where M is the number of memory rows and i is an integer from 1 to M, inclusive. The proposed strategy achieves a measured 0.15 dB gain improvement at a 2e-4 Quasi-Error-Free (QEF) BER in the presence of memory faults for an AWGN channel.

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors projects that embedded memories will occupy increasing System-on-Chip area. The growing density of integration increases the likelihood of fabrication faults. The proposed memory repair strategy employs forward error correction at the system level and mitigates the impact of memory faults through permutation of high sensitivity regions. The effectiveness of the proposed repair technique is demonstrated on a 19.4-Mbit de-interleaver SRAM memory of an ISDB-T digital baseband OFDM receiver in 65-nm CMOS. The proposed technique introduces a single multiplexer delay overhead and a configurable area overhead of M/i bits, where M is the number of memory rows and i is an integer from 1 to M, inclusive. The proposed strategy achieves a measured 0.15 dB gain improvement at a 2e-4 Quasi-Error-Free (QEF) BER in the presence of memory faults for an AWGN channel.

Network topologies play a vital role in chip design; they largely determine the cost of the network and significantly impact performance in many-core architectures. We propose a novel set of on-chip networks, dodecs, and illustrate how they reduce network diameter with randomized low-radix router connections. In addition, we design an adaptive routing algorithm for dodec networks to achieve high throughput. By introducing randomness, dodec networks exhibit more uniform message latency. By using low-radix routers, dodec networks simplify the router microarchitecture and attain 20% area and 22% power reduction compared to mesh routers while delivering the same overall application performance for PARSEC. We compare our dodec network to alternative low-radix network topologies and show that at the same cost, dodec networks increase the throughput up to 50% while reducing average latency by 10% compared to a mesh.

Reconfigurable and dynamic computer architecture is an exciting area of research that is rapidly expanding to meet the requirements of compute intense real and non-real time applications in key areas such as cryptography, signal/radar processing and other areas. To meet the demands of such applications, a parallel single-chip heterogeneous Hybrid Data/Command Architecture (HDCA) has been proposed. This single-chip multiprocessor architecture system is reconfigurable at three levels: application, node and processor level. It is currently being developed and experimentally verified via a three phase prototyping process. A first phase prototype with very limited functionality has been developed. This initial prototype was used as a base to make further enhancements to improve functionality and performance resulting in a second phase virtual prototype, which is the subject of this thesis. In the work reported here, major contributions are in further enhancing the functionality of the system by adding additional processors, by making the system reconfigurable at the node level, by enhancing the ability of the system to fork to more than two processes and by designing some more complex real/non-real time applications which make use of and can be used to test and evaluate enhanced and new functionality added to the architecture. A working proof of concept of the architecture is achieved by Hardware Description Language (HDL) based development and use of a Virtual Prototype of the architecture. The Virtual Prototype was used to evaluate the architecture functionality and performance in executing several newly developed example applications. Recommendations are made to further improve the system functionality.

This thesis involves modeling, design, Hardware Description Language (HDL) design capture, synthesis, implementation and HDL virtual prototype simulation validation of an interconnect network for a Hybrid Data/Command Driven Computer Architecture (HDCA) system. The HDCA is a single-chip shared memory multiprocessor architecture system. Various candidate processor-memory interconnect topologies that may meet the requirements of the HDCA system are studied and evaluated related to utilization within the HDCA system. It is determined that the Crossbar network topology best meets the HDCA system requirements and it is therefore used as the processormemory interconnect network of the HDCA system. The design capture, synthesis, implementation and HDL simulation is done in VHDL using XILINX ISE 6.2.3i and ModelSim 5.7g CAD softwares. The design is validated by individually testing against some possible test cases and then integrated into the HDCA system and validated against two different applications. The inclusion of crossbar switch in the HDCA architecture involved major modifications to the HDCA system and some minor changes in the design of the switch. Virtual Prototype testing of the HDCA executing applications when utilizing crossbar interconnect revealed proper functioning of the interconnect and HDCA. Inclusion of the interconnect into the HDCA now allows it to implement dynamic node level reconfigurability and multiple forking functionality.