Industry Expert Blogs

Several companies have attacked the QoS problem in SoC design, and what is emerging from that conversation is the best approach may be several approaches combined in a hybrid QoS solution. At the recent Linley Group Mobile Conference, NetSpeed Systems outlined just such a solution with an unexpected plot twist in synthesis.

The QoS picture isn’t as simple as it looks; there are more factors than slotting traffic in some priority scheme where higher priority stuff moves through the system with less blocking. NetSpeed’s Joe Rowlands called this “lossy” information transfer, where local decisions on traffic patterns might solve a localized problem but don’t necessarily help overall system performance.

Let’s separate out the fact that IP blocks tend to speak different QoS languages – the case for using a network-on-chip in abstracting QoS in the first place.

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