Research And Implementation Of SCI High Speed Serial Communication Interface Based On FPGA

This is the further extension of the subtask of the 863 national projects in military industry: communication card in flight control, which held by the computer science department of Xiamen University and the national major laboratory in intelligent technology and system of Tsinghua University.SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface) is an interface standard for very high performance multiprocessor systems. It supports a coherent shared-memory model. SCI's low pin counts and simple ring topology make it cost-effective for small systems as well as for the massively parallel ones. SCI supports many different interconnect configurations, ranging from simple ring to complex multistage switching networks. SCI uses point-to-point unidirectional communication between neighboring nodes, greatly reducing the nonideal transmission-line problems. A large number of requests can be outstanding at the same time, making SCI well suited for high-performance multiprocessor systems. SCI allows up to 64K nodes to be connected in a single system. Since each node could itself be multiprocessors, the SCI addressing mechanism will be sufficient to support the next generation of massively parallel computer systems.One key point of this thesis is analyzing and researching the SCI protocol. It discusses the node, link, topology, package, transaction, package encoding, CRC, addressing, system initialization and so forth in detail. Another key point is designing a SCI-based high speed serial communication interface with FPGA. The simulation and test proves that this design is logical and feasible, and it's the base of our further research. Besides, this thesis introduces basic principles and tools in FPGA digital circuit design.Finally, this thesis discusses the limitation of SCI protocol in Real-Time systems, and analyzes the SCI Real-Time extension technologies now in research by IEEE, focusing on the Directed Flow Control Protocol (DFC) proposed by SCI/RT workgroup. At last, put forward some personal views about the extension and application of SCI in Real-Time systems.