TY - JOUR
T1 - Meshed Bluetree
T2 - Time-Predictable Multimemory Interconnect for Multicore Architectures
AU - Wang, Haitong
AU - Audsley, Neil C.
AU - Hu, Xiaobo Sharon
AU - Chang, Wanli
PY - 2020/10/2
Y1 - 2020/10/2
N2 - Multicore architectures are widely adopted in the emerging real-time applications, such as autonomous vehicles and robotics, where latency is required to be both bounded in the worst case (i.e., time predictability) and low. With the number of processors growing, the conventional memory interconnects, i.e., shared bus, crossbar, and network-on-chip (NoC), suffer high latency due to the increasing logic size of their centralized arbiter, which is deployed for time predictability. In this article, we introduce a novel distributed multimemory interconnect, Meshed Bluetree, and explain its operation. Constructed by coupling a router network with multiple Bluetree-based memory architectures in parallel, Meshed Bluetree allows simultaneous access to multiple memory modules. We present the analysis for the predictable timing behavior of memory access to bound the worst case. The evaluation of FPGA with synthetic memory workloads and real-world benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of our work, i.e., as the number of memory modules increases, the latency is reduced with the same scale. This work reports the first time-predictable distributed multimemory interconnect, significantly contributing to multicore real-time systems.
AB - Multicore architectures are widely adopted in the emerging real-time applications, such as autonomous vehicles and robotics, where latency is required to be both bounded in the worst case (i.e., time predictability) and low. With the number of processors growing, the conventional memory interconnects, i.e., shared bus, crossbar, and network-on-chip (NoC), suffer high latency due to the increasing logic size of their centralized arbiter, which is deployed for time predictability. In this article, we introduce a novel distributed multimemory interconnect, Meshed Bluetree, and explain its operation. Constructed by coupling a router network with multiple Bluetree-based memory architectures in parallel, Meshed Bluetree allows simultaneous access to multiple memory modules. We present the analysis for the predictable timing behavior of memory access to bound the worst case. The evaluation of FPGA with synthetic memory workloads and real-world benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of our work, i.e., as the number of memory modules increases, the latency is reduced with the same scale. This work reports the first time-predictable distributed multimemory interconnect, significantly contributing to multicore real-time systems.
KW - Memory interconnect
KW - multicore architecture
KW - time predictability
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096033037&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TCAD.2020.3012239
DO - 10.1109/TCAD.2020.3012239
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85096033037
SN - 0278-0070
VL - 39
SP - 3787
EP - 3798
JO - IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
JF - IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
IS - 11
M1 - 9211438
ER -