Exploring On-Chip Bus Architectures for Multitask Applications

In this paper we present a static performance estimation technique of on-chip bus architectures. The proposed technique requires the static scheduling of function blocks of a task to analyze bus conflicts caused by simultaneous accesses from processing elements to which function blocks are mapped. To apply it to multitask applications, the concurrent execution of the function blocks of different tasks also should be considered. Since tasks are scheduled independently, considering all cases of concurrency in each processing element is impractical. Therefore we make an average estimate on the effects of other tasks with respect to bus request rate and bus access time. The proposed technique was incorporated with our exploration framework for on-chip bus architectures. Its viability and efficiency are validated by a preliminary example.