CHIPLETs From Aurora VLSI Speed SOC Development

- To facilitate faster SOC development cycles, Aurora VLSI is offering CHIPLETs.  Each CHIPLET is a complete subsystem IP core that connects seamlessly to industry standard interfaces both internal to an SOC and at its pads.  In days gone by, any given CHIPLET would have been a standard product semiconductor chip.  With today’s high levels of integration, such a chip becomes a subsystem within an SOC- a CHIPLET.

A CHIPLET represents a higher level of integration than is commonly found in today’s IP cores.  It moves the integration level from IP cores up to IP subsystems.  Each CHIPLET contains several IP cores and the glue logic necessary for them to function together as a complete subsystem within an SOC.  CHIPLET ports are defined to be industry standard interfaces to avoid the need for additional glue logic and its associated design effort.  Thus, a designer can simply drop a CHIPLET into his SOC at industry standard interfaces with no need for any design effort to add the desired subsystem function to his SOC.

Bus compatible communications subsystems are the first CHIPLETs available from Aurora VLSI.  Each of these CHIPLETs includes a popular communications IP core (ie. Ethernet MAC, etc.) , an interface to an internal SOC bus, a DMA Engine to move data blocks, configuration registers, and interrupt logic.  Aurora VLSI will support popular SOC internal buses such as AMBA, OCP, and others.  The communications cores are popular functions such as Ethernet, USB, PCI, and others that all have well defined industry standard protocols and external interfaces.  These communications protocols move blocks of data, and therefore a DMA engine is included to efficiently do these block data moves.  To complete each of these CHIPLETs, configuration registers and interrupt logic support the function.

Initially, Aurora VLSI communications CHIPLETs interface to the AMBA AHB Bus.  Other buses will be supported based on customer demand.  CHIPLET products available now are the Ethernet 10/100 MAC (AU-NB8006), Ethernet 10/100/1000 MAC (AU-NB8800), USB 1.1 device (AU-UB7211, AU-UB7311), USB 2.0 device (AU-UB7220, AU-UB7320), 32 bit PCI interface (AU-PB8032), 64 bit PCI interface (AU-PB8064), IEEE 1394a with and without OHCI (AU-FB8010, AU-FB8011), HPNA 2.0 (AU-NB8008), and Utopia 1/2/2+/3/3+ (AU-NB9003), all with AMBA AHB Bus interfaces and DMA.

All communications CHIPLETs are available as synthesizable Verilog models from Aurora VLSI, Inc.   

About Aurora VLSI
Aurora VLSI, Inc. was founded in 1998 to develop and market consumer networking processors, processor cores, peripherals cores, and SOC subsystem cores. Aurora VLSI also provides services to customize, integrate, and assist customers in any other way in their ASIC/SOC development.

Aurora VLSI is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and its web site is www.auroravlsi.com.