An 80 Gbps dependable multicore communication SoC with PCI express I/F and intelligent interrupt controller

An 80 Gbps dependable communication SoC with four 4X PCIe Rev.2.0 ports has been developed that acts as a communication link with high transfer capability. By using the PCIe I/F, the SoC can address two computing nodes as peers, breaking the traditional PCIe limit of only linking to a single master processor. The SoC also employs an intelligent ICU that supports an initiate data transfer function and offloads interrupt services from the CPUs. This function can dramatically reduce processing time by 20% compared to using CPU interrupt handlers. To achieve a highly dependable network, the multicore processor continuously monitors the network status and operates the fault handling efficiently by using IRQ affinity. Our SoC achieves the power consumption of 3.2W at 80 Gbps and the power efficiency of 0.04 W/Gbps, which is 51.5% more power efficiency than 4X InfiniBand.