Architecting and Building High-Speed SoCs

3

Basic and Advanced On-Chip Busses and Interconnects

This chapter will begin by providing an overview of the buses and interconnects that are used within an SoC. We will introduce the concepts of data sharing and coherency and how to solve their associated challenges. This will give you a good introduction to the Advance Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) and the Open Core Protocol (OCP) protocols. Finally, we will cover the data movement within an SoC and how to use DMA engines.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• On-chip buses and interconnects overview
• ARM AMBA interconnect protocols suite
• OCP interconnect protocol
• DMA engines and data movements
• Data sharing and coherency challenges

On-chip buses and interconnects ...