AXI-IC^{RT}: Towards a Real-Time AXI-Interconnect for Highly Integrated SoCs

In modern real-time heterogeneous System-on-Chips (SoCs), ensuring the predictability of interconnects is becoming increasingly important. Most of the existing interconnects are mainly designed to achieve high throughput, with their micro-architectures usually based on FIFO queues. The FIFO-based design prevents transaction prioritization based on importance and leads to occurrences of physical priority inversion. Such problems lead to difficulties in ensuring transaction predictability, especially when the system scales to a large number of elements. In this paper, we introduce AXI-Interconnect^{rt} (AXI-IC^{rt}, for short) -- a real-time AXI interconnect for heterogeneous SoCs, which redefines the micro-architecture of interconnects by enabling random accesses of buffered transactions and organizing transactions through compositional scheduling. This hardware-software co-design approach provides predictable and scalable real-time performance for highly integrated SoCs.