OCP is Adopted at MIPS Technologies

By Tom Petersen, Director, Product Marketing, MIPS Technologies, Inc.

On June 16, 2003, MIPS Technologies announced the 24K™ microarchitecture at the Embedded Processor Forum in San Jose. The microarchitecture forms the basis for the highest performing MIPS32™-based synthesizable cores in the industry (550 Mhz in 130nm LV-OD technology). Such high performance enables media-rich SOC designs to incorporate fixed functions into programmable cores. Core derivatives of the 24K microarchitecture will be the first from MIPS Technologies to use OCP as the native interface, providing customers with the high performance and configurability of an open industry standard interface.

MIPS Technologies decided to move away from its internal interfaces to lower design costs by enabling greater reuse of SOC IP, while improving customers’ time-to-market. The open nature of OCP encourages multiple IP providers to converge on a single interface style, and this convergence brings critical mass to third parties that provide enabling tool and verification flows. This virtuous cycle has the effect of reducing the amount of enabling development that each SoC user undertakes on their own. Furthermore, OCP defines an interconnect independent interface. Now OCP compliant IP providers can design cores that have interface characteristics that match the requirements of their cores, not some arbitrary interconnect requirement. Various interface translations (widths, frequencies, burst options, etc) are resolved inside the interconnect. Silicon vendors can truly build designs using plug-and-play techniques since IP blocks do not require modification for every instance.

OCP is one of the few interfaces that delivers on the promise of IP reuse. SOCs can be configured and designs can be turned in short order, which makes OCP-based designs more competitive in the embedded marketplace. MIPS Technologies is leveraging this technology advantage to the benefit of our customers.

For more information, visit www.mips.com. 

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