Connecting High-Speed Devices Using Buses and Interconnects
This chapter begins by giving an overview of the buses and interconnects used off-chip to connect an FPGA-based SoC to other high-speed devices on the electronics board. It introduces the PCIe interconnect, the Ethernet interconnect, and the emerging Gen-Z protocol. It also provides a good overview of the emerging CCIX interconnect protocol and the concept of extending data coherency off-chip by adding protocol layers in the SoC hardware to implement it.
In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:
- An overview of the legacy off-chip interconnects
- An introduction to the PCIe bus
- An overview of the Ethernet interconnects
- An introduction to the Gen-Z bus protocol
- An overview of the CCIX protocol and off-chip data coherency