A Lightweight and High-Throughput Asynchronous Message Bus for Communication in Multi-Core Heterogeneous Systems

In multi-core heterogeneous systems, communication on the data bus/NoC (Network-on-Chip) is complex. To ensure low-latency transmission of high-level messages, such as control messages, configuration instructions, and status information, while maintaining the efficiency of data bus/NoC transmission,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2024, Vol.12, p.48555-48569
Main Authors: Zeng, Qingyang, Wang, Jingyu, Cong, Jiaxu, Shang, Delong
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
asynchronous blocking retransmission buffer
Asynchronous communication
Asynchronous message bus
Benchmark testing
Clocks
Communication
Data buses
Encoding
Energy consumption
Flow control
globally asynchronous locally synchronous
Lightweight
Low latency communication
Message services
Messages
Packet transmission
Power demand
Protocols
quasi-synchronous communication
Receivers
Signal resolution
System on chip
Throughput
Transmitters
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Summary:In multi-core heterogeneous systems, communication on the data bus/NoC (Network-on-Chip) is complex. To ensure low-latency transmission of high-level messages, such as control messages, configuration instructions, and status information, while maintaining the efficiency of data bus/NoC transmission, we propose the concept of a message bus. In this paper, we present a lightweight and high-throughput asynchronous message bus capable of receiving and forwarding messages from different synchronous domains. A Quasi-Synchronous communication mechanism is proposed, where flits from the transmitter can be transmitted at fixed intervals without waiting for the ready signal from the receiver. This resolves the additional latency introduced by asynchronous handshaking, particularly in long-wire transmissions. Instead of flit-level handshaking, we introduce a packet-level flow control mechanism to avoid data overflow. Furthermore, we propose a novel Asynchronous Blocking Retransmission Buffer (ABRB) to address the communication congestion where subsequent packets are blocked by preceding ones. The packets can be sequentially written into the ABRB, enabling partial parallel transmission. For various benchmarks, the proposed asynchronous message bus achieves significant performance and energy consumption improvements compared to the synchronous baseline, at the cost of some additional area overhead and more design effort.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3380477