Insuring silicon Intellectual Property interoperability with OCP consensus profiles

By Vesa Lahtinen, Yasumasa Nakada, Christophe Sucur and Drew Wingard, OCP-IP Specification Working Group
Embedded.com -- (05/13/08, 12:05:00 AM EDT)

The ability to use internally and externally developed IP (Intellectual Property) cores in ASIC creation is essential to achieving high quality products and time-to-market for any designer of ASICs and SoCs.

Since 2001, OCP-IP (Open Core Protocol " International Partnership) consortium has provided an open standard synchronous protocol for point-to-point interconnection of IP modules.

OCP has a wide range of configuration parameters which makes OCP uniquely easy to be optimized to fit the varying demands of a wide range of IP cores and systems.

When the parameterization of the master and slave interfaces do not match, the protocol defines a set of rules that both ensure interoperability wherever possible, and describes behavioral restrictions on the master and/or slave to increase interoperability.

When the interface parameterization differs sufficiently that key master or slave functionality is not supported by the other side, protocol conversion bridging is occasionally required. When the IP cores that are inconsistent are separated by a shared interconnect, it is sometimes a role of the interconnect to provide this protocol conversion.

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