Abstract

A key issue with high performance SoC platforms is how to interconnect their modules to effectively transfer large amounts of data in real-time. Today's most practical communication infrastructures are bus-based due to the small number of processing elements residing on a silicon die. Since the bandwidth of a shared bus goes down with the number of bus masters, hierarchical structures are used to parallelize transfers and to obtain a higher throughput. Hence, a novel shared memory SoC communication infrastructure based on the Advanced High-Speed Bus (AHB) is defined in this thesis. The objective of this dissertation is to explore various avenues to design a bus operating with a clock in excess of 2 GHz when targeting a 0.18 om CMOS process. As a first iteration, the fastest circuit techniques are reviewed so as to traverse the learning curve that a designer must experiment with very high-speed designs. To enhance the understanding of high-speed circuit styles, the main cores of an AHB are implemented from a novel, and aggressive, true-single-phase-clocking (TSPC) circuit style. The 2 GHz AHB arbiter has been laid out to prove the performance of the circuit techniques explored with the full-custom SoC infrastructure. In addition, an innovative 2 GHz pipelined memory has been created to respond to the hard IP requirements.