Managing Performance in Modern SoC Designs

As industries like automotive, consumer electronics, telecommunications and artificial intelligence (AI) push for greater processing power, efficiency and scalability, system-on-chip (SoC) designs have rapidly evolved to meet these demands. With the growing complexity of modern SoCs, designers face the challenge of managing an increasing number of interconnected IP blocks while ensuring seamless communication and optimal system performance. Balancing these elements while maintaining efficient data flow and meeting diverse requirements has become a pressing concern in SoC design.

The increasing sophistication of SoC designs has caused traditional interconnect methods to struggle with scaling, leading to performance bottlenecks and higher power consumption. As data traffic increases, delays and inefficiencies strain system performance. Additionally, managing wire density and optimizing die area becomes more challenging as designs evolve. Traditional communication systems require numerous wires to handle expanding data loads, complicating routing and making timing closure harder to achieve. Balancing performance, power and area (PPA) requirements is increasingly difficult, highlighting the need for more efficient solutions.

In multi-core SoCs, maintaining cache coherency and managing memory subsystems present additional difficulties, especially as more processors and accelerators need to access and share data efficiently. Ensuring data consistency while minimizing traffic and latency is critical to prevent performance degradation. This is further compounded by the need to integrate IP blocks from various sources, manage thousands of registers and synchronize hardware and software interfaces. Late-stage design changes and ensuring compliance with industry standards further complicate the process, often leading to risks, errors and delays.

Fig.1: Interconnects are critical components to performant SoCs. Manual designs are often overdesigned, negatively impacting PPA (Source: Arteris).

Solutions for Modern SoC Challenges

To meet these challenges, engineers are increasingly turning to advanced interconnect methodologies that can scale with the demands of SoC designs. As shown in Figure 1, one approach is commercial network-on-chip (NoC) architectures, which offer scalable, flexible, and efficient methods for managing communication, minimizing latency, optimizing power consumption and reducing the area required by minimizing the number of wires and simplifying routing. NoCs are quickly becoming the solution of choice for addressing the needs of today’s complex systems.

Fig. 2: Resolving design complexity with commercial NoC IP (Source: Arteris).

NoC architectures provide adaptable data paths that can dynamically route information between IP blocks, reducing latency and improving energy efficiency. By creating a flexible network of switches, NoCs significantly reduce the number of physical connections needed, helping to alleviate congestion, lower power consumption and simplify timing closure. Additionally, serialization techniques allow designers to customize data flow based on specific requirements, further enhancing system performance without expanding the physical footprint.

Optimizing the memory subsystem is a key strategy for preventing performance bottlenecks. In multi-core designs, cache coherency plays a vital role in ensuring processors work with up-to-date data. Ncore’s integrated SLC caches and FlexNoC’s optional CodaCache accelerates memory bandwidth and reduces latency. Synchronizing caches across cores helps maintain system performance and reduces inefficiencies. Quality-of-service (QoS) mechanisms further enhance this by prioritizing critical data traffic, such as CPU and GPU communication, to prevent performance degradation in time-sensitive tasks.

One of the major strengths of NoC architectures is their inherent flexibility and extendability. Supporting a wide range of topologies and protocols, NoCs can be tailored to the specific needs of each design. By adjusting routing, serialization and switching mechanisms, NoCs ensure that data moves efficiently between IP blocks. Multi-clock domain and power domain separation support further enhances this flexibility, allowing each part of the SoC to operate according to its own workload requirements, ensuring that the system is optimized for both performance and efficiency.

Arteris NoC Solutions and Integration Software

Arteris offers several NoC solutions, including FlexNoC and Ncore, along with Magillem integration software, designed to address the growing demands and challenges in SoC designs. These technologies work together to improve data flow, reduce latency and optimize power efficiency, meeting the demands of today’s applications.

FlexNoC 5 optimizes communication and routing between IP blocks, addressing congestion and timing challenges. Its physical awareness feature helps align design decisions with the physical layout early on, making wire placement more efficient and simplifying timing closure. FlexNoC 5’s flexible topologies allow designers to balance bandwidth and latency to meet performance and power requirements.

Ncore ensures data consistency and efficient memory access in multi-core systems. It uses coherent caches and snoop filters to keep shared data synchronized across processors, reducing traffic and preventing bottlenecks. Ncore’s ability to support heterogeneous IP scalability accommodates diverse architectures.

Magillem Registers and Magillem Connectivity automate IP block integration and register management, reducing errors and improving design consistency. The software streamlines the connection of IPs from multiple sources and simplifies register management, ensuring compliance with industry standards and making late-stage design changes easier to handle.  Plus, it allows easier and faster documentation – a single source of truth – in complex designs.

Together, the Arteris product flow of FlexNoC, Ncore and Magillem software provides a comprehensive solution to the PPA and integration challenges in SoC designs.

Conclusion

As the demands on SoCs continue to grow, traditional in-house interconnect methods are no longer sufficient to address the challenges of performance, power efficiency and scalability. NoC architectures, along with solutions like Arteris’ FlexNoC, Ncore and Magillem software, offer scalable and efficient methods to manage the increasing complexity of SoC designs. These technologies not only improve communication and data flow but also simplify integration, reduce power consumption and optimize system performance. By deploying commercial NoC IP and adopting advanced SoC integration tools, designers can better manage the growing number of IP blocks, ensure data consistency and meet the PPA requirements of today’s applications.