A Formal Semantics for Control and Data Flow in the Gannet Service-Based System-on-Chip Architecture

There is a growing demand for solutions which allow the design of large and complex reconfigurable Systems-on-Chip (SoC) at high abstraction levels. The Gannet project proposes a functional programming approach for high-abstraction design of very large SoCs. Gannet is a distributed service-based SoC architecture, i.e. a network of services offered by hardware or software cores. The Gannet SoC is task-level reconfigurable: it performs tasks by executing functional task description programs using a demand-driven dataflow mechanism. The Gannet architecture combines the flexible connectivity offered by a Network-on-Chip with the functional language paradigm to create a fully concurrent distributed SoC with the option to completely separate data flows from control flows.