Nowadays the majority of system-on-chips are designed by placing various IP blocks such as CPUs, memories and accelerators on the same chip. With the advantage of silicon manufacturing technologies, it has become possible to place hundreds of CPU cores and other design blocks on the same chip. A communication system that transfers data between chip components largely affects overall chip performance, computational speed and response time for external events.
Firstly, this thesis studies the main on-chip interconnect design paradigms. According to the presented research, various architectures may be chosen for an interconnect design depending on the required complexity and number of subsystems. The shared and hybrid bus interconnects are one of the oldest means of on-chip communication. They are efficient for small systems with no more than ten IP blocks. The crossbars or bus matrix interconnects can help to build on-chip communication systems which can efficiently interconnect dozens of system-on-chip modules. The networks-on-chip can provide a communication solution for large scale chip designs with hundreds of IP blocks.
The second part of this thesis focuses on the novel Ballast chip implementation and its interconnect design. The Ballast is a heterogeneous multiprocessor chip designed for edge computing and general-purpose computing applications. In this thesis Ballast interconnect was designed from scratch by using a cascaded crossbar approach by connecting three open-sourced AXI protocol bus matrices. The designed interconnect allows to efficiently connect 6 bus masters with 9 slaves and provides up to 9,6 GB/s bandwidth for the most productive CPU subsystem
