From ASICs to SOCs: A Practical Approach

Highlights

The OCP promotes IP core reusability and reduces design time, design risk, and manufacturing costs for SOC designs. The OCP is focused exclusively on the needs of an IP core; nothing about the OCP is bus or application specific.

• Enables IP core creation to be independent of system architecture and application design

• Describes all intercore communications

• Optimizes die area by configuring into the OCP only those features needed by the core

• Uses timing guidelines to assure IP core interoperability:

  Level 2— highest performance interface timing

  Level 1— conservative timing for effortless core connect

  Level 0— protocol without timing specified (especially useful for verification and simulation tools)