Multicore SoCs change interconnect requirements
Greg Shippen, Freescale Semiconductor
EE Times (10/20/2008 12:01 AM EDT)
The recent appearance of multicore system-on-chip (SoC) devices has rearranged the boundaries among silicon devices, boards and subsystems. This trend has led to significant changes in chip-to-chip and board-to-board interconnect requirements. Are existing standards-based interconnects ready for this transition?
With the introduction of the microprocessor in the 1970s, simple computing systems were constructed on a single board using a discrete processor, memory controller and I/O interface device. Board-level buses connected the devices; when higher performance was desired, multiple boards were assembled together. Backplanes provided communication between cards using a system-level bus.
These board- and system-interconnect protocols were proprietary. Over time, closed protocols gave way to standardized protocols such as Ethernet, PCI Express or RapidIO.
EE Times (10/20/2008 12:01 AM EDT)
The recent appearance of multicore system-on-chip (SoC) devices has rearranged the boundaries among silicon devices, boards and subsystems. This trend has led to significant changes in chip-to-chip and board-to-board interconnect requirements. Are existing standards-based interconnects ready for this transition?
With the introduction of the microprocessor in the 1970s, simple computing systems were constructed on a single board using a discrete processor, memory controller and I/O interface device. Board-level buses connected the devices; when higher performance was desired, multiple boards were assembled together. Backplanes provided communication between cards using a system-level bus.
These board- and system-interconnect protocols were proprietary. Over time, closed protocols gave way to standardized protocols such as Ethernet, PCI Express or RapidIO.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- Chiplet Die-to-Die Interconnect IP Solution
- High speed MACsec Engine 100G/200G/400G/800G/1.6T
- Temperature/Voltage sensors
- AMBA Bus Host to eSPI Controller/Target
- AMBA Bus Host to eSPI Controller
Related Articles
- Using dynamic run-time scheduling to improve the price-performance-power efficiency of heterogeneous multicore SoCs
- Multicore microprocessors and embedded multicore SOCs have very different needs
- Build low power video SoCs with programmable multi-core video processor IP
- Using drowsy cores to lower power in multicore SoCs
Latest Articles
- ZK-Flex: A Flexible and Scalable Framework for Accelerating Zero-Knowledge Proofs
- ITP-STDP: An Intrinsic-Timing Power-of-Two Learning Engine for On-Chip SNN Training
- OpenEye: A Scalable Open-Source Hardware Accelerator for DNNs
- CHIMERA: A Flexible and Scalable 3.1 TOPS/W AI-MCU with Transformer Accelerator and 563 Gb/s Shared-L2 Memory Subsystem with QoS Guarantees
- CXL-ClusterSim: Modeling CXL-based Disaggregated Memory Cluster for Pooling and Sharing using gem5 and SST