Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chips

14.7. The Ever Critical Communication Bus Structures

Multimedia SoCs frequently house multiple processor cores that share the task of running the operating system and controlling the critical and noncritical on-chip functional-unit resources. In this context, an efficient bus architecture and arbitration (for reducing contention) play important roles in maximizing system performance. Besides, for many applications, the performance of multiprocessor systems relies heavily on an efficient communication between the processors and a balanced load distribution (of computing tasks) among them.

With multiple CPUs and a plethora of functional units, on-chip communication poses a critical design problem that is often solved using multilevel hierarchical ...