A multicast inter-task communication protocol for embedded multiprocessor systems

Recently, a new programming model and platform interface for MPSoC design and integration called TTL (Task Transaction Level) has been developed and advocated as a standard. In this paper, a specific implementation of the TTL interface named ITCP (Inter-Task Communication Protocol) is presented. ITCP is well suited for both hardware and software implementations and supports features such as multitasking and multicast communication. A configurable SystemC model of the ITCP protocol and its integration in a system-level design methodology is disclosed in this work. Moreover, details of a multi-task ITCP software shell implementation for an ARM9 with eCos RTOS are also given in the paper.