SNP: a new communication protocol for SoC

This paper proposes a new communication protocol, SNP (SoC Network Protocol), for SoC design. SNP in the basic mode uses only about three fifths of the wires used by widely used AMBA AHB bus. To reduce bandwidth degradation due to the reduction of wires, SNP proposes a new phase-restoration feature that skips control and/or address signals whenever they are redundant. For efficient bandwidth utilization and real-time support, a phase-interleaving scheme is proposed. In order to reduce the number of wires further, SNP defines reduced modes that use fewer signals than the basic mode. An analysis shows that the bandwidth of SNP is greater than that of the widely used AMBA AHB when the communication traffic includes more burst transactions than single transactions in spite of having wires only about three fifths of AHB.