Towards IP integration on SoC: a case study of high-throughput and low-cost wrapper design on a novel IBUS architecture

To integrate third-party intellectual properties (IPs) into a new system-on-chip (SoC) architecture is a big challenge. Therefore, this study first presents a new bus protocol named as integrated bus (IBUS), and more important, a configurable bus wrapper for connecting AXI3-interfaced IPs into IBUS is further proposed, aiming to finding the optimal balance between bus efficiency and resource cost in terms of field-programming gate array slice count, bus transfer latency, and energy consumption. As a case study, the authors implemented three IBUS wrappers for integrating three AXI3-interfaced verification IPs into an IBUS SoC. Experimental results show that their proposed work achieves a higher valid data throughput ( in the block test and in the cipher test) compared with the designs on conventional bridge-based SoC integration, as well as a large reduction in the normalised slice-time-power (18.73% in the block benchmark and 23.45% in the cipher benchmark) when setting the same weights of slice number, data transfer latency, and energy dissipation.