CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

Unreleased

Added

Hardware

• The floo_pkg was extended with helper functions to calculate the size of AXI payloads and mapping of AXI to Floo Channels.
• Multiple configuration structs were introduced to enable a more flexible and non-verbose configuration of the FlooNoC modules.
  • The AxiCfg describes all the necessary parameters needed for the type definitions of a bidirectional AXI interface
  • The RouteCfg describes all the necessary routing information parameters required by the chimneys.
  • The ChimneyCfg describes all other parameters for the data path of the chimney (e.g. Mgr/Sbr port enable, number of oustanding transactions, RoB types & sizes, etc.)
• The floo_test_pkg now defines default configurations for all the new configuration structs that are used by the testbenches.
• Add floo_axi_router module, which is a wrapper similar to the floo_nw_router but for single-AXI configurations, and can be used in conjunction with floo_axi_chimney.

FlooGen

• The data_width and user_width fields for protocols are now also validated to be compatible with each other.
• All the various *Cfg's is now rendered by FlooGen, either in the *_noc_pkg or in the *_noc module itself.
• Added support for single-AXI configuration networks.
• Support for negative increments when specifying a src_range or dst_range in the connections schema.
• Add support for multiple non-contiguous address ranges for endpoints.

Changed

Hardware

• The floo_narrow_wide_* modules and the corresponding testbenches were renamed to floo_nw_* to be more concise.
• The flit type definitions are now implemented as SystemVerilog macros in typedef.svh.
• The parametrization of the chimney modules has changed dramatically. They now use the newly introduced *Cfg's from the floo_pkg. In the narrow-wide chimneys, both datapaths now have their own configs (i.e. *CfgN and *CfgW), to reduce the verbosity of the module instantiation.
• The payload field name in each *_chan_t type previously had its own name. This was unified to payload since *_chan_t already determines the type of the payload.
• The input and output buffer FIFO depth of the routers were renamed to InFifoDepth and OutFifoDepth to be more consistent (previously ChannelFifoDepth and OutputFifoDepth).
• The narrow-wide router wrapper now also requires the AxiCfg structs to redefine the link types internally.
• The ReorderBufferSize parameters was shortened to RoBSize.
• All testbenches were adapted to all changes.
• All verification IPs were adapted to the new configuration structs.

FlooGen

• The link typedefs are now renderd with the macros in typedef.svh instead of rendering them in pure SystemVerilog.
• The template files were renamed to use the more concise nw naming scheme.
• The generated modules and packages of FlooGen are now named floo_*_noc resp. floo_*_noc_pkg which is more consistent since all other modules have the floo_* prefix.
• The protocols schema was adapted a bit to be more intuitive.
  • The type field was renamed to protocol, which currently only accepts AXI4. A new type field now is used by FlooGen to now where to attach the protocol in the network interface. Currently, FlooGen only supports the narrow-wide AXI configuration, hence only narrow|wide is allowed as type values.
  • The direction field in the protocol schema is no longer required, since the direction is determined when specifying mgr_port_protocol and sbr_port_protocol.
  • The name field must be unique now, since it is used by mgr_port_protocol and sbr_port_protocol to reference the exact protocol.
  • All examples were adapted to reflect those changes.
• A FlooGen configuration file now requires a network_type field, to determine the type of network to generate. The options are axi for single-AXI networks and narrow-wide for the narrow-wide AXI configurations.
• The system address map Sam is now sorted correctly and can be indexed with ep_id_e values.
• id_offset was renamed to xy_id_offset, since this is now only applicable in XYRouting networks. An ID offset does not make sense for other types of routing algorithms. The use of id_offset is anyway not recommended anymore, since the direction of the connections can be specified in the connections schema.

Fixed

• A bug in the calcuation of the RoB offset in floo_rob was fixed. Previously, the allocation and the write process used the same counter in bursts for offset calculation, which resulted in wrong offsets.
• Routers with XYRouting do now use the global id_offset, which was previously not accounted for (or had to be specified manually).
• Fixed elaboration errors in the chimneys that occured.

Removed

Hardware

• As the flit type definitions were moved to typedef.svh, the auto-generated floo_*_pkg packages were removed from the repository. Furthermore, all the (global) imports of those packages in the modules were replaced by parameters.
• The testbench tb_floo_nw_chimney was removed since it was neither used nor maintained anymore.
• The IdIsPort routing algorithm was removed since it can only be used for routes over a single router. The same functionality can be achieved with the SourceRouting algorithm.
• The dma_mesh testbench was removed in favor of nw_mesh and axi_mesh which use generated networks with FlooGen.

FlooGen

• The package generation was removed from FlooGen since it is now handled by the typedef.svh file. Further, the --only-pkg and --pkg-outdir flags were removed from the FlooGen CLI.
• The calculation of link sizes and AXI to Floo channel mapping was removed from the FlooGen configuration file. This is now handled by the floo_pkg helper functions.

[0.5.0] - 2024-09-13

Added

• Support for source-based routing algorithm in routers, chimnyes and floogen. The route is encoded in the header as a route_t field, and each router consumes a couple of bits to determine the output ports. In the chimney, a two-stage encoder was added to first determine the destination ID of the request, and then retrive the pre-computed route to that destination from a table. The floogen configuration was extended to support the new routing algorithm, and it will also generate the necessary tables for the chimneys.
• Chimneys now support multiple AXI IDs for non-atomic transactions by specifying the MaxUniqueids parameter. This will mitigate ordering of transactions from initially different IDs or endpoints at the expense of some complexity in the meta_buffer which then uses id_queue to store the meta information required to return responses.
• The conversion from req/rsp with different ID widths from/to NoC has been moved from the chimneys to the floo_meta_buffer module.
• Added virtual channel router floo_vc_router and corresponding floo_vc_narrow_wide_chimney. Currently only supports XY-Routing and mesh topologies.
• Preliminary support for multiple local ports in the routers.
• Additional traffic pattern generation and visualization.
• Added option in floogen to define the direction of connections to/from routers with dst_dir and src_dir flags. This replaces the previous id_offset flag for that purpose. Specifying the direction of the connection is useful for mesh topologies with XYRouting, but also for tile-based implementation, where the order of the ports matters resp. needs to be known.
• routers in floogen can no be configured with degree to overwrite the number of ports. This is manily useful for tile-based implementations, where all tiles should have identical routers.

Changed

• floo_route_comp now supports source-based routing, and can output both destination ID and a route to the destination.
• The chimneys have an additional port route_table_i to receive the pre-computed routing table that is generated by floogen.
• System address map was renamed from AddrMap to Sam.
• The destination field in the flit header have a new type dst_t which is either set to route_t for the new source-based routing algorithm, and id_t for all the other routing algorithms.
• Bumped idma dependency to 0.6
• Renamed rsvd field in flits to payload to better reflect its purpose.
• Reordered directions in route_direction_e to better support multiple local ports.
• Moved all system related rendered parameters from the flit package to its own package in my_system_floo_noc.sv. This allows to use the auto-generated routing information for tile-based implementations, that are assembled by hand.
• The bidirectional flag for connections in floogen is set to true by default, since uni-directional links are currently not supported.
• The System Address now needs to be passed as a parameter in the chimneys, since it is not part of the flit packages anymore.

Fixed

• The generation of the unique ID has been changed resp. aligned for 2D meshes to increment Y-first and X-second. This way the address range and ID increment are consistent with each other.
• Broadcasted input id_i in the chimneys should not throw an error anymore in elaboration.
• The id_offset should not be correctly applied in the system address map. Before it resulted in negative coordinates.
• The axi_ch_e types now have an explicit bitwidth. Previously, this caused issues during elaboration since a 32-bit integer was used as a type.
• Fixed a typedef in floo_vc_arbiter when setting NumVirtChannels to 1, that caused issue when compiling with Verilator.
• Fixes issue that the routing table was not renderred when IdTable was used as the routing algorithm.

Removed

• Removed all floo_synth* wrapper modules. They are moved to the internal PD repository, since they are not really maintained as part of the FlooNoC repository.

[0.4.0] - 2024-02-07

Added

• Added assertions to XY routers with routing optimization enabled to catch packets that want to Y->X which is illegal in XY routing.

Changed

• The parameters EnMgrPort and EnSbrPort are swapped in the chimneys to be more consistent. FlooNoC defines subordinate ports as requests that go out of the NoC to AXI subordinates (i.e. memories) that return a response, and manager ports as requests that come into the NoC from AXI managers (i.e. cores).
• The floo_narrow_wide_join now uses axi_riscv_atomics to filter out atomic operations. The atop_filter are still there but are disabled by default.

Fixed

• Synthesis wrappers now use the more generic id_t instead of the deprecated xy_id_t type as a parameter.
• The specified ID offset is now also rendered for routers in floogen.
• Fixed a template rendering issue where XY routers could not be rendered when the first direction (EJECT) was not defined.

Removed

• Removed floo_synth_mesh, floo_synth_mesh_ruche & floo_synth_router_simple synthesis wrappers, since they are not used anymore.

[0.3.1] - 2024-01-16

Added

• floo_narrow_wide_join which joins a narrow and a wide AXI bus

Changed

• Wormhole routing for bursts was removed for some channels in the chimney since it is generally not necessary if the header information is sent in parallel to the payload.

Fixed

• Output directory passed to floogen is now relative to the current working directory instead of the installation folder of floogen.
• Write ordering in the narrow-wide version was incorrect. Sending AW and W beats over different channels would have allowed to arrive them out of order, if multiple managers are sending write requests to the same subordinate, which could result in interleaving of the data. This is now fixed by sending AW and W beats over the same wide channel. The AW and W beats are coupled together and wormhole routing prevents interleaving of the data.

[0.3.0] - 2024-01-09

Added

• Added NoC generation framework called floogen. Also added documentation for floogen in the docs folder.
• Added Chimney Parameters EnMgrPort and EnSbrPort to properly parametrize Manager resp. Subordinate-only instances of a chimney
• Added XYRouteOpt parameter to router to enable/disable routing optimizations when using XYRouting

Changed

• the exported include folder of the floo package is moved to hw/include.
• The LICENSE file was updated to reflect that the project uses the Solderpad Hardware License Version 2.1 for all hw files and the Apache License 2.0 for software related files.
• The directory was restructured to accomodate the new floogen framework. The src was renamed to hw, which contains only SystemVerilog code. Test modules and testbenches were also moved to hw/test and hw/tb respectively. The same holds true for wave files, which are now located in hw/tb/wave.
• The SV packages floo_axi_pkg and floo_narrow_wide_pkg are now generated by floogen. The configuration files were moved to the floogen/examples folder, and were aligned with the new floogen configuration format, that is written in YAML instead of hjson.
• Reworked the python dependencies to use pyproject.toml instead of requirements.txt. Furthermore, the python requirement was bumped to 3.10 due to floogen (which makes heavy use of the newer match syntax)
• Removed xy_id_i ports from AXI chimneys in favor of a generic id_i port for both IdTable and XYRouting
• Changed auto-generated package configuration schema. The header field is replaced in favor of a routing field that better represents the information needed for routing.
• XYRouting now also supports a routing table similar to the IdTable routing table. Before the destination was determined based on a couple of bits in the address. This however did not allow for a lot of flexibility and requires a larger addres width.

Fixed

• Fixed missing backpressure in the NoRoB version of the reorder buffer, which could lead to overflow of counters

Removed

• axi_channel_compare was removed in favor of axi_chan_compare from the axi repository.
• Removed flit generation script flit_gen.py including configuration files, since this is now integrated into floogen (in conjunction with the --only-pkg flag)

[0.2.1] - 2023-10-13

Changed

• Bump dependencies

[0.2.0] - 2023-10-04

Changed

• Renamed *_flit_pkg to *_pkg
• New naming scheme of ports: All AXI ports are now prefixed with axi_, all FlooNoC links are now prefixed with floo_
• Renamed floo_param_pkg to floo_test_pkg
• Renamed AXI resp_t structs to rsp_t
• Changed configuration format to align with upcoming FlooNoC generation script

Added

• Table based routing support in narrow_wide_chimney
• Support for different number of inputs and outputs in narrow_wide_router
• Add wrapper for different types of Reorder Buffers in chimneys
• Support for simple RoB-less chimneys with ID counters

Fixed

• Test modules floo_axi_rand_slave & floo_dma_test_node now support addr_width > 32
• Fixed synchronization issues for ATOP B and R responses

[0.1.0] - 2023-06-19

Added

• Initial early public release