Socket-Based Design Using Decoupled Interconnects

Abstract

Advances in deep sub-micron semiconductor process technologies offer the SoC designer the promise of more functionality than can be realized using existing tightly coupled architectures and EDA tools. As the ability to integrate IP cores increases linearly, the complexity of interconnecting these cores also increases, often geometrically. The overhead in design, integration, and verification of inter-core communications quickly becomes greater than the design savings in using pre-verified functional cores. The solution requires a matching of interconnect implementations to computational blocks. Socket-based design is a design methodology that can greatly reduce the time and effort expended on design and verification of complex SoCs. We will discuss the challenges of tightly coupled design, explain why decoupled interconnect design is essential, define socket-based design; explore the OCP socket specification and give examples of both processor-centric and I/O-centric SoC design using OCP-based sockets and decoupled interconnect cores.