A predictable communication assist

Abstract

Modern multi-processor systems need to provide guaranteed services to their users. A communication assist (CA) helps in achieving tight timing guarantees. In this paper, we present a CA for a tile-based MP-SoC. Our CA has smaller memory requirements and a lower latency than existing CAs. The CA has been implemented in hardware. We compare it with two existing DMA controllers. When compared with these DMAs, our CA is up-to 44% smaller in terms of equivalent gate count.