Power optimization and performance improvement for embedded Ethernet SOC  

作　　者：ZHENG Zhao-xia ZOU Lian-ying GAO Jun 

机构地区：[1]Research Center for VLSI and Systems, Huazhong University of Science andTechnology, Wuhan 430074, China [2]School of Electric and information Engineering, Wuhan Institute ofTechnology, Wuhan 430074, China

出　　处：《The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications》2008年第2期102-106,共5页中国邮电高校学报（英文版）

基　　金：the Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China (2006AA01Z226)

摘　　要：Information appliance is the combination of traditional home appliances and the internet technology. In this article, an Ethernet controller system-on-chip （SOC） solution for information appliances is presented. To achieve high performance, the embedded 8 bits 8051 micro control unit （MCU） is optimized by an independent instruction bus and a data bus. Besides, a two-stage pipeline feature is added. Compared with the existing 8051 core, the enhanced one-cycle MCU offers ten times improvement in instruction execution efficiency. Meanwhile, the performance of media access control （MAC） circuit is greatly improved by adopting various techniques such as direct memory access （DMA） control, paging strategy, etc. To reduce the power consumption, clock gating, low power supply, and multi-working-clock are adopted. Moreover, to achieve rapid data communication in different clock frequency circuits, a simple ping-pong first in first out （FIFO） circuit is realized. The chip is implemented using TSMC 0.25 μm two-poly four-metal mixed signal complementary metal oxide semiconductor （CMOS） technology. Its die area is 4.8 min× 4.6 mm. The test results show that the maximum throughput of Ethernet packets can reach 7 Mb/s while the power consumption is rather low-the working current is just about 200 mA.Information appliance is the combination of traditional home appliances and the internet technology. In this article, an Ethernet controller system-on-chip （SOC） solution for information appliances is presented. To achieve high performance, the embedded 8 bits 8051 micro control unit （MCU） is optimized by an independent instruction bus and a data bus. Besides, a two-stage pipeline feature is added. Compared with the existing 8051 core, the enhanced one-cycle MCU offers ten times improvement in instruction execution efficiency. Meanwhile, the performance of media access control （MAC） circuit is greatly improved by adopting various techniques such as direct memory access （DMA） control, paging strategy, etc. To reduce the power consumption, clock gating, low power supply, and multi-working-clock are adopted. Moreover, to achieve rapid data communication in different clock frequency circuits, a simple ping-pong first in first out （FIFO） circuit is realized. The chip is implemented using TSMC 0.25 μm two-poly four-metal mixed signal complementary metal oxide semiconductor （CMOS） technology. Its die area is 4.8 min× 4.6 mm. The test results show that the maximum throughput of Ethernet packets can reach 7 Mb/s while the power consumption is rather low-the working current is just about 200 mA.

关 键 词：low power technology hardware/software co-design circular buffer THROUGHPUT 

分 类 号：TN4[电子电信—微电子学与固体电子学] TP393[自动化与计算机技术—计算机应用技术]