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Kees Goossens

Other affiliations: Synopsys, Delft University of Technology, NXP Semiconductors  ...read more
Bio: Kees Goossens is an academic researcher from Eindhoven University of Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Network on a chip & System on a chip. The author has an hindex of 45, co-authored 270 publications receiving 8198 citations. Previous affiliations of Kees Goossens include Synopsys & Delft University of Technology.


Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The AEthereal NoC is introduced, which provides guaranteed services (GSs) - such as uncorrupted, lossless, ordered data delivery; guaranteed throughput; and bounded latency - are essential for the efficient construction of robust SoCs and exploits the NoC capacity unused by the GS traffic.
Abstract: The continuous advances in semiconductor technology enable the integration of increasing numbers of IP blocks in a single SoC. Interconnect infrastructures, such as buses, switches, and networks on chips (NoCs), combine the IPs into a working SoC. Moreover, the industry expects platform-based SoC design to evolve to communication-centric design, with NoCs as a central enabling technology. In this article, we introduce the AEthereal NoC. The tenet of the AEthereal NoC is that guaranteed services (GSs) - such as uncorrupted, lossless, ordered data delivery; guaranteed throughput; and bounded latency - are essential for the efficient construction of robust SoCs. To exploit the NoC capacity unused by the GS traffic, we provide best-effort services.

952 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
03 Mar 2003
TL;DR: In this article, the guaranteed throughput (GT) and best-effort (BE) routers are combined in an efficient implementation by sharing resources, and the trade offs between hardware complexity and efficiency of the combined router are discussed.
Abstract: Managing the complexity of designing chips containing billions of transistors requires decoupling computation from communication. For the communication, scalable and compositional interconnects, such as networks on chip (NoC) must be used. In this paper, we show that guaranteed services are essential in achieving this decoupling. Guarantees typically come at the cost of lower resource utilization. To avoid this, they must be used in combination with best-effort services. The key element of our NoC is a router consisting conceptually of two parts: the so-called guaranteed throughput (GT) and best-effort (BE) routers. We combine the GT and BE router architectures in an efficient implementation by sharing resources. We show the trade offs between hardware complexity and efficiency of the combined router, and the motivation of our choices. Our reasoning for the trade offs is validated with a prototype router implementation. We show a lay-out of an input-queued wormhole 5/spl times/5 router with an aggregate bandwidth of 80 Gbit/s. It occupies 0.26 mm/sup 2/ in CMOS12. This shows that our router provides high performance at reasonable cost, bringing NoCs one step closer.

510 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
30 Sep 2007
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a memory controller design that provides a guaranteed minimum bandwidth and a maximum latency bound to the IPs, which is accomplished using a novel two-step approach to predictable SDRAM sharing.
Abstract: Memory requirements of intellectual property components (IP) in contemporary multi-processor systems-on-chip are increasing. Large high-speed external memories, such as DDR2 SDRAMs, are shared between a multitude of IPs to satisfy these requirements at a low cost per bit. However, SDRAMs have highly variable access times that depend on previous requests. This makes it difficult to accurately and analytically determine latencies and the useful bandwidth at design time, and hence to guarantee that hard real-time requirements are met. The main contribution of this paper is a memory controller design that provides a guaranteed minimum bandwidth and a maximum latency bound to the IPs. This is accomplished using a novel two-step approach to predictable SDRAM sharing. First, we define memory access groups, corresponding to precomputed sequences of SDRAM commands, with known efficiency and latency. Second, a predictable arbiter is used to schedule these groups dynamically at run-time, such that an allocated bandwidth and a maximum latency bound is guaranteed to the IPs. The approach is general and covers all generations of SDRAM. We present a modular implementation of our memory controller that is efficiently integrated into the network interface of a network-on-chip. The area of the implementation is cheap, and scales linearly with the number of IPs. An instance with six ports runs at 200 MHz and requires 0.042 mm2 in 0.13μm CMOS technology.

239 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A Composable and Predictable Multi-Processor System on Chip (CoMPSoC) platform template is proposed, which enables a divide-and-conquer design strategy, where all applications, potentially using different programming models and communication paradigms, are developed and verified independently of one another.
Abstract: A growing number of applications, often with firm or soft real-time requirements, are integrated on the same System on Chip, in the form of either hardware or software intellectual property. The applications are started and stopped at run time, creating different use-cases. Resources, such as interconnects and memories, are shared between different applications, both within and between use-cases, to reduce silicon cost and power consumption.The functional and temporal behaviour of the applications is verified by simulation and formal methods. Traditionally, designers resort to monolithic verification of the system as whole, since the applications interfere in shared resources, and thus affect each other's behaviour. Due to interference between applications, the integration and verification complexity grows exponentially in the number of applications, and the task to verify correct behaviour of concurrent applications is on the system designer rather than the application designers.In this work, we propose a Composable and Predictable Multi-Processor System on Chip (CoMPSoC) platform template. This scalable hardware and software template removes all interference between applications through resource reservations. We demonstrate how this enables a divide-and-conquer design strategy, where all applications, potentially using different programming models and communication paradigms, are developed and verified independently of one another. Performance is analyzed per application, using state-of-the-art dataflow techniques or simulation, depending on the requirements of the application. These results still apply when the applications are integrated onto the platform, thus separating system-level design and application design.

204 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
07 Mar 2005
TL;DR: An operational design flow is described that generates and configures application-specific network on chip (NOC) instances, given application communication requirements, that are guaranteed to meet the application's communication requirements in minutes.
Abstract: Systems on chip (SOC) are composed of intellectual property blocks (IP) and interconnect. While mature tooling exists to design the former, tooling for interconnect design is still a research area. In this paper we describe an operational design flow that generates and configures application-specific network on chip (NOC) instances, given application communication requirements. The NOC can be simulated in SystemC and RTL VHDL. An independent performance verification tool verifies analytically that the NOC instance (hardware) and its configuration (software) together meet the application performance requirements. The AEthereal NOC's guaranteed performance is essential to replace time-consuming simulation by fast analytical performance validation. As a result, application-specific NOCs that are guaranteed to meet the application's communication requirements are generated and verified in minutes, reducing the number of design iterations. A realistic MPEG SOC example substantiates our claims.

192 citations


Cited by
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The research shows that NoC constitutes a unification of current trends of intrachip communication rather than an explicit new alternative.
Abstract: The scaling of microchip technologies has enabled large scale systems-on-chip (SoC). Network-on-chip (NoC) research addresses global communication in SoC, involving (i) a move from computation-centric to communication-centric design and (ii) the implementation of scalable communication structures. This survey presents a perspective on existing NoC research. We define the following abstractions: system, network adapter, network, and link to explain and structure the fundamental concepts. First, research relating to the actual network design is reviewed. Then system level design and modeling are discussed. We also evaluate performance analysis techniques. The research shows that NoC constitutes a unification of current trends of intrachip communication rather than an explicit new alternative.

1,720 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The AEthereal NoC is introduced, which provides guaranteed services (GSs) - such as uncorrupted, lossless, ordered data delivery; guaranteed throughput; and bounded latency - are essential for the efficient construction of robust SoCs and exploits the NoC capacity unused by the GS traffic.
Abstract: The continuous advances in semiconductor technology enable the integration of increasing numbers of IP blocks in a single SoC. Interconnect infrastructures, such as buses, switches, and networks on chips (NoCs), combine the IPs into a working SoC. Moreover, the industry expects platform-based SoC design to evolve to communication-centric design, with NoCs as a central enabling technology. In this article, we introduce the AEthereal NoC. The tenet of the AEthereal NoC is that guaranteed services (GSs) - such as uncorrupted, lossless, ordered data delivery; guaranteed throughput; and bounded latency - are essential for the efficient construction of robust SoCs. To exploit the NoC capacity unused by the GS traffic, we provide best-effort services.

952 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper develops a consistent and meaningful evaluation methodology to compare the performance and characteristics of a variety of NoC architectures and explores design trade-offs that characterize the NoC approach and obtains comparative results for a number of common NoC topologies.
Abstract: Multiprocessor system-on-chip (MP-SoC) platforms are emerging as an important trend for SoC design. Power and wire design constraints are forcing the adoption of new design methodologies for system-on-chip (SoC), namely, those that incorporate modularity and explicit parallelism. To enable these MP-SoC platforms, researchers have recently pursued scaleable communication-centric interconnect fabrics, such as networks-on-chip (NoC), which possess many features that are particularly attractive for these. These communication-centric interconnect fabrics are characterized by different trade-offs with regard to latency, throughput, energy dissipation, and silicon area requirements. In this paper, we develop a consistent and meaningful evaluation methodology to compare the performance and characteristics of a variety of NoC architectures. We also explore design trade-offs that characterize the NoC approach and obtain comparative results for a number of common NoC topologies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in characterizing different NoC architectures with respect to their performance and design trade-offs. To further illustrate our evaluation methodology, we map a typical multiprocessing platform to different NoC interconnect architectures and show how the system performance is affected by these design trade-offs.

921 citations