Parallel overloaded CDMA interconnect (OCI) bus architecture for on-chip communications

Abstract

On-chip interconnects are the performance bottleneck in modern System-on-Chips (SoCs). Bus topologies and Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are the main approaches used to implement on-chip communication. The interconnect fabric enables resource sharing by Time and/or Space Division Multiple Access (T/SDMA) techniques. Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) has been proposed to enable resource sharing in on-chip interconnects where each data bit is spread by a unique orthogonal spreading code of length N. Unlike T/SDMA, in wireless CDMA, the communication channel capacity can be increased by overcoming the Multiple Access Interference (MAI) problem. In response, we present two overload CDMA interconnect (OCI) bus architectures, namely TDMA-OCI (T-OCI) and Parallel-OCI (P-OCI) to increase the classical CDMA interconnect capacity. We implement and validate the T-OCI and P-OCI bus topologies on the Xilinx Artix-7 AC701 kit. We compare the basic SDMA, TDMA, and CDMA buses and evaluate the OCI buses in terms of the resource utilization and bus bandwidth. The results show that the T-OCI achieve 100% higher bus capacity, 31% less resource utilization compared to the conventional CDMA bus topology. The P-OCI bus provides N times higher bus bandwidth compared to the T-OCI bus at the expense of increased resource utilization.