We present several enhancements to the open-source ESP platform to support flexible and efficient on-chip communication for programmable accelerators in heterogeneous SoCs. These enhancements include 1) a flexible point-to-point communication mechanism between accelerators, 2) a multicast NoC that supports data forwarding to multiple accelerators simultaneously, 3) accelerator synchronization leveraging the SoC's coherence protocol, 4) an accelerator interface that offers fine-grained control over the communication mode used, and 5) an example ISA extension to support our enhancements. Our solution adds negligible area to the SoC architecture and requires minimal changes to the accelerators themselves. We have validated most of these features in complex FPGA prototypes and plan to include them in the open-source release of ESP in the coming months.

翻译：我们对开源ESP平台进行了多项增强，以支持异构SoC中可编程加速器的灵活高效片上通信。这些增强包括：1）加速器间灵活的点对点通信机制；2）支持同时向多个加速器转发数据的组播片上网络；3）利用SoC一致性协议实现的加速器同步机制；4）提供细粒度通信模式控制的加速器接口；5）支持上述增强功能的指令集架构扩展示例。该解决方案为SoC架构增加的面积开销可忽略不计，且对加速器本身的修改要求极低。我们已在复杂的FPGA原型系统中验证了大部分功能，并计划在未来数月内将其纳入ESP平台的开源版本中。