News and New Products

Group preps Open Core Protocol 2.1

By Jeff Berman, News Editor -- EDN, 3/11/2005

The Open Core Protocol International Partnership (OCP-IP), a concern dedicated to promoting the Open Core Protocol as a socket standard for the rapid creation and integration of IP (intellectual property)-based components, has announced that version 2.1 of its specification will be available at the end of March.

OCP 2.1 will include seven profiles for the most commonly coupled OCP features and an advanced tagging scheme that provides enhancement for out-of-order processing.

"This [updated specification] provides users with necessary and useful features," said Ian Mackintosh, OCP-IP president. The profiles, Mackintosh said, are "canned" examples intended to help users get into adoption and usage mode more quickly, he said.

"The interdependencies of specifications are not needed [with user profiles] based on the experience of the OCP community," Mackintosh said. "Four of the profiles are for new IP with basic user profiles. By creating new IP blocks, users can work off of basic implementations and cover a wide spectrum of IP types. The other three profiles are legacy IP-based, used to speed learning and help adoption and be OCP-compliant."

The tagging scheme allows users to tag specific transactions and thus ensure that the system will respect read/write hazards, according to the group. "The tags are helpful with out-of-order processing and elegant threading schemes that exist in OCP," Mackintosh said. Tagging schemes have already proven effective and robust in shipping products and are closely tied to the needs of current and future processors.

Various companies worked on the OCP-IP 2.1 specification, including MIPS Technologies, Nokia, Philips, Sonics, and Texas Instruments.