ABSTRACT
Semiconductor technology improvements enable designers to integrate complex systems composed of tens and even hundreds of modules (blocks or components) into a single chip, called a System-on-Chip (SoC). An on-chip module can be an Intellectual Property core (IP such as a digital signal processor (DSP), a general purpose processor, or a specific custom hardware module), an embedded memory, a peripheral controller (such as a USB controller), or even a complex sub-system composed itself of IPs, memory blocks, and a local interconnect. SoC applications span from dedicated real-time systems to massively parallel general-purpose ones. To address this latter, Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MP-SoCs) have been developed. Such huge Systems-on-
Architecture,
Chip require high-bandwidth interconnecting structures for communication, which have become a challenge in System-on-Chip design.
