Architecture: Bus and Device Structure

In this section we examine the basic anatomy of a SoC. Transmitting data consumes energy and causes delay. Basic physical parameters:

• Speed of light on silicon and on a PCB is 200 metres per microsecond.
• A clock frequency of 2 GHz has a wavelength of 2E8/2E9 = 10 cm.
• Within a synchronous digital clock domain we require connections to be less than (say) 1/10th of a wavelength.
• Conductor series resistance further slows signal propagation and is dominant source of delay.
• So need to register a signal in several D-types if it passes from one corner of an 8mm chip to the other!
• Can have several thousand wires per millimetre per layer: fat busses (128 bits or wider) are easily possible.
• Significant DRAM is several centimeters away from the SoC and also has significant internal delay.

Need to use protocols that are tolerant to registers (4P H/S degrades with reciprocal of delay).

(Die stacking and recent DRAM-on-SoC approaches reduce wire length to a few mm for up to 500 MB of DRAM.)

But first let's revist the simple hwen/rwen system used in the `socparts' section.