On-Chip Communication Architectures

Chapter 2. Basic Concepts of Bus-Based Communication Architectures

Buses are one of the most widely used means of communicating between components in a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design. The simplicity and efficiency of transferring data on buses has ensured that they remain the preferred interconnection mechanism today. A bus connects possibly several components with a single shared channel. The shared channel can be physically implemented as a single wire (i.e., a serial bus or a set of wires) which makes up a parallel bus. This parallel bus is the typical implementation choice for a bus in almost all widely used on-chip bus-based communication architectures. Although a bus is essentially a broadcast medium, in most cases data transmitted on the ...