Book excerpt: Introduction to Open Core Protocol

I promised to deliver a preview of the new OCP-IP book written by David Schwaderer and here it is. I will be presenting three parts of the book from chapters 1 through 3. Thanks to Ian Mackintosh at OCP-IP and Charles Glaser at Springer for making this possible.

From the preface
Welcome to the Open Core Protocol (OCP) world. OCP is a compact interface, designed to accelerate IP core-to-core interface design efforts. It has many features that are each individually simple. Collectively, they allow designers to create interfaces with arbitrary intricacy. With OCP, the only limit seems to be your imagination.

The OCP International Partnership (OCP-IP) oversees OCP’s standardization and evolution efforts. There are many international participants in OCP-IP, and OCP-IP membership is available at several participating levels. That said, OCP has achieved global popularity based on its simplicity and the fact that the specification is available at no charge for research purposes. You will want to visit OCP-IP’s Web site at www.ocpip.org for all the details.

From the back cover
This book introduces Open Core Protocol (OCP), not as a conventional hardware communications protocol but as a meta-protocol: a means for describing and capturing the communications requirements of an IP core, and mapping them to a specific set of signals with known semantics.  Readers will learn the capabilities of OCP as a semiconductor hardware interface specification that allows different System-On-Chip (SoC) cores to communicate.  The OCP methodology presented enables intellectual property designers to design core interfaces in standard ways. This facilitates reusing OCP-compliant cores across multiple SoC designs which, in turn, drastically reduces design times, support costs, and overall cost for electronics/SoCs. Provides a comprehensive introduction to Open Core Protocol, which is more accessible than the full specification; Designed as a hands-on, how-to guide to semiconductor design; Includes numerous, real “usage examples” which are not available in the full specification; Integrates coverage of design methodology discussing why cores are structured the way they are, whereas the official OCP specification only answers what the structure is.

The book is available here

Contents:
In the Beginning...There Were No Standards
OCP Training Wheels
OCP Write Operations
OCP Signals and Signal Groupings
Basic Signal Burst Extensions
Read Timing Diagrams
OCP Tags, Threads, and Connections
OCP Signal Groups and Phases
OCP Coherence Extensions: Theory of Operation
OCP Coherence Extensions: Signals and Encodings
OCP Coherence Extensions Timing Diagrams
Benchmarking Network-on-Chip (NoC) Designs.



In this installment, chapter 1 is presented

Chapters 2 and 3 to come in the following weeks.

Excerpts used with permission from Springer © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012

Brian Bailey – keeping you covered

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