This hands-on and accessible book introduces Open Core Protocol (OCP) 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.

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.

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.- OCP-IP Debug Interfaces.- Benchmarking Network-on-Chip (NoC) Designs.