Design And ASIC Implement Of PCI-to-starFbric Bridge

With the development of computer, the need for high speed data transmit capability increases as well as the hardware of system getting complexly. The traditional shared bus way becomes the interactive bottleneck of data. The highway demands higher demands to satisfy the large number of real-time data transmission. New data transfer mood will be helpful to impove the performance of system.For the shortage of the traditional shared bus, switched fabric technology is used increasely. Star Fabric is an open switched fabric technology good in switching performance and exploitability. For the reason of high speed bus technology, Star Fabric will accelerate the development of informance processor. In the system, various point-to-point communication links are organized together and ultimately bring about concomitant transmission of the modules.Star Fabric system consists of bridge and gateway. The main job of this paper is to design the bridge chip which to translate the signals between PCI and Star Fabric. The chip realizes the function of translation of signals between PCI signals of configure, read, write and Star Fabric signals, and data transmission between PCI and Star Fabric.The design was accomplished in hardware description language, simulated with Nano Sim and VCS, verified in FPGA and finally taped out. Test results indicate that the PCI can work correctly at 33 MHz or 66 MHz and Star Fabric can work correctly using 4 couples of LVDS interfaces at 2.5Gbps. Two channels of Star Fabric can make the transmission between several PCI bus interfaces corectly. The result shows that the chip can satisfy the demand of system to improve the performance of PCI.