Lecture 9 - Åbo Akademi

Some driving forces: Scalability
• Bus technology not very scalable with respect to
• High performance
• Effective on-chip communication
• Reasonable cost
• Segmenting buses
• Bus: long wire, globally clocked, stretching on whole chip
• Bus segments: separate groups of locally clocked, bundled
wires, BRIDGED with each other at each end
• Difficult for complex SoCs and multicore chips
• Need manual design for different segments suiting specific chip
architectures (core placements and configurations)
• Expensive and time-consuming