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Electronic Systems Design Seminar
http://embedded.eecs.berkeley.edu/esd-seminar Drew Wingard, Ph.D. Chief Technical Officer Sonics, Inc. Mountain View, CA, USA wingard@sonicsinc.com Tuesday, November 25th, 2003, 11am - 12:30pm Hogan's Room, Cory hall Abstract: Advances in sub-micron
semiconductor processing technologies have increased the complexity of
designing SOCs beyond the ability of existing tightly coupled
architectures and existing EDA tools. Functional core reuse is a means
to reduce design complexity and speed development of successful silicon
and such design teams rely heavily upon third-party or internally
developed IP core libraries. But as the ability to add more on-chip IP
cores increases, the complexity of interconnecting these cores
increases as a function of the overall connectivity, i.e.
geometrically. The overhead in design, integration, and verification of
inter-core communications – and the long wires that implement them –
quickly becomes untenable. The solution requires a matching of
interconnect implementations (interconnect cores) to computational
blocks (functional cores). Socket-based design is a
communications-centric 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 (Open Core Protocol) socket specification and give
examples of both processor-centric and I/O-centric system-level design
using OCP-based sockets and decoupled interconnect cores.
Speaker
Prior to founding Sonics,
Wingard led the development of advanced circuit and CAD methodology for
MicroUnity Systems Engineering, Inc. Previously he had co-founded
Pomegranate Technology, where he designed an advanced SIMD multimedia
processor. Dr. Wingard received a B.S. from the University of Texas,
Austin and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in
electrical engineering. While at Stanford, Dr. Wingard's research
explored the optimization of design processes between architectural,
logical, circuit, and physical design with an emphasis on tools and
automation.
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