SoC 101 - Lecture 4a: On-Chip Interconnect

System-on-Chip 101
or
"Everything you wanted to know about a computer but were afraid to ask"

This is Lecture 4 of my "SoC 101" course at Bar-Ilan University. In this course, I provide an overview of computer hardware engineering and SoC design, covering the full stack from the basic terminology, through computer architecture, and up to low-level software and design methodologies. The purpose of this course is to methodologically tell you about all those things that you may not have heard during your engineering studies and "fill the gaps" between the parts that you learned in-depth. It is in no way intended to provide a full, detailed description of every concept introduced, but following the course will give you a good idea about how a computer or any embedded system actually works.

Lecture 4 moves out of the scope of the CPU (Lectures 2 and 3) and focuses on On-Chip Interconnect, or how the components on an SoC communicate with each other. In this lecture, we will go over the importance of on-chip communication, considerations in interconnect design, bus terminology and basic topologies. We will then build up the design of interconnect interfaces and protocols, using the AMBA specification to demonstrate this, starting with APB, moving on to AHB, and finishing with AXI, as an example of a high-performance bus.

Lecture slides can be found on the EnICS Labs web site at:

All rights reserved:
Prof. Adam Teman
Emerging nanoscaled Integrated Circuits and Systems (EnICS) Labs
Faculty of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University

[emadzokaei]

Would you please have a separate course on System Verilog for digital design in the future if possible. Thank you Professor

[dGooddBaddUgly]

Does "ps" stand for picoseconds?