The Open Core Protocol (OCP) is a protocol for on-chip subsystem communications. It is an openly licensed, core-centric protocol and defines a bus-independent, configurable interface.

OCP International Partnership Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera) is a standards organization that supports a mix of user and vendor standards and open interfaces development in the area of electronic design automation (EDA) and integrated circuit (IC) design and manufactu ...

( OCP-IP) produces OCP specifications. OCP data transfer models range from simple request-grant handshaking through pipelined request-response to complex out-of-order operations. Legacy IP cores can be adapted to OCP, while new implementations may take advantage of advanced features: designers select only those features and signals encompassing a core’s specific data, control and test configuration. The Open Core Protocol (OCP) is one of several FPGA processor interconnects used to connect soft FPGA peripherals to FPGA CPUs -- both

soft microprocessor A soft microprocessor (also called softcore microprocessor or a soft processor) is a microprocessor core that can be wholly implemented using logic synthesis. It can be implemented via different semiconductor devices containing programmable logic ...

and hard-macro processor. Other such interconnects include

Advanced eXtensible Interface The Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI), is an on-chip communication bus protocol developed by ARM. It is part of the Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture 3 (AXI3) and 4 (AXI4) specifications. AXI has been introduced in 2003 with the AMBA3 sp ...

(AXI), Avalon, and the Wishbone bus. FPGA vendor Altera joined the Open Core Protocol International Partnership in 2010."Altera, others join open core protocol group"

Advantages

* Eliminates the ongoing task of interface protocol (re)definition, verification, documentation and support * Readily adapts to support new core capabilities * Test bench portability simplifies (re)verification * Limits test suite modifications for core enhancements * Interfaces to any bus structure or on-chip network * Delivers industry-standard flexibility and reuse * Point-to-point protocol can directly interface two cores

Disadvantages

* Neither

Altera Altera Corporation was a manufacturer of programmable logic devices (PLDs) headquartered in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1983 and acquired by Intel in 2015. The main product lines from Altera were the flagship Stratix series, mid-ra ...

nor

Xilinx Xilinx, Inc. ( ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company was known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and creating the fi ...

, the two largest

FPGA A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturinghence the term ''Field-programmability, field-programmable''. The FPGA configuration is generally specifi ...

vendors, supports this protocol.

References

External links

* {{Official website Computer peripherals