NetSpeed’s Pegasus Last-Level Cache IP Improves SoC Performance and Reduces Latency

Memory is always a critical resource for a System-on-Chip (SoC) design. It seems like designers are always wanting more memory, and the memory they have is never fast enough to keep up with the processors, especially when using multi-core processors and GPUs. To complicate matters, today’s SoC architectures tend to share memory across heterogeneous environments including temporal (isochronous, steady, random) and functional (fully coherent, IO-coherent and non-coherent) features. System designers are forever trading off performance and latency against the sharing of memory resources, power reduction and ensuring system timing integrity.

Many designers are now turning to what is known as last-level cache (LLC) to avoid SoC memory access bottlenecks and congestion among heterogeneous masters. Some designers primarily think of a LLC as simply a L3 cache, however the people at NetSpeed have taken the LLC concept to a much higher level. Pegasus is the product name for NetSpeed’s LLC IP and when used in combination with NetSpeed’s NocStudio design software, Pegasus can be used to optimize circuit throughput, reduce latency and improve memory efficiency.

Pegasus is a parameterized and configurable LLC architecture that is layered over NetSpeed’s Orion and Gemini Network-on-Chip (NoC) technologies. Pegasus leverages NetSpeed’s core NoC capabilities to ensure quality of service (QoS) and deadlock avoidance while also allowing the designer to support coherent, non-coherent and mixed architectures. The IP provides support for design-time programmable coherent-cache and coherent-memory modes along with memory error-correcting code (ECC) capabilities.

Pegasus also features runtime modes that enable soft partitioning of cache associativity per master. This allows designers to better utilize their cache resources through integration of some system IPs and by enabling the use of some or all their LLCs as directly addressable RAM. This latter capability is particularly useful when having to support multiple applications processors on the SoC that differ in their RAM requirements.

A key feature of Pegasus is that the IP is both design and runtime programmable and it supports multiple modes including, coherent cache, reduced coherent latency, power reduction, memory cache, increased bandwidth through locality and improved software coherency by avoiding the need for flushes. Not all slave agents are created the same and having multiple LLCs, based on address ranges, gives designers the ability to customize each LLC based on the slave characteristics.

Pegasus also works with NocStudio’s understanding of the SoC’s floorplan to enable distributed LLCs which can aid in connectivity-congestion mitigation and improve overall system bandwidth and latency through locality. In addition, Pegasus can do all of this while working in coordination with ARM’s Trust Zone capabilities to ensure complete protection of a device from bad outside actors trying to breach the SoC’s key memory and code blocks. This is an essential feature for designs targeted at the Internet-of-Things (IoT) market.

Since Pegasus is used with NetSpeed’s NocStudio software many steps to configure and program the LLCs are automated making it easier for designers to incorporate Pegasus into their designs. Using NocStudio, designers can simulate their SoCs with different configurations of LLCs over different work-loads and expected traffic patterns to ensure latency and performance are optimized. This is important as coherent SoCs often have processors with conflicting needs and which may have some traffic flows that are highly sensitive to CAS latency while others are more sensitive to bandwidth requirements. Striking a balance in a heterogenous SoC is non-simplistic and Pegasus along with NocStudio makes the job a lot easier.

Not only can the Pegasus LLC IP help with system throughput, bandwidth and latency, it can also be used by designers to reduce their overall SoC power consumption. Pegasus enables better memory efficiency resulting in lower power consumption by removing unnecessary look-ups and making intelligent decisions on managing, optimizing, and accessing memory. A configurable LLC can be tailored to the specific characteristics of the DDR controller and can augment the optimizations of the controller by making smart decisions within the LLC.

Additionally, LLC RAM banks are relatively easy to selectively power down. Pegasus allows runtime configuration of the LLCs to enable designers to selectively shut down all or part of the LLCs when the SoC goes into low-power mode. This feature can be exploited to squeeze out the last bit of spare power in the system.

So, to summarize, NetSpeed’s LLC is not a simple L3 cache. If you are building complex SoCs with a heterogeneous mixture of coherent and non-coherent IPs, the use of NetSpeed’s Pegasus LLC IP can help you to buffer and smooth out conflicting NoC traffic, eliminate memory bottlenecks, boost overall system performance, reduce traffic-dependent latencies, improve overall memory efficiency and reduce overall system power. That’s a whole lot of functionality for one IP.

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