Experiments with the peripheral virtual component interface

ABSTRACT

The Peripheral Virtual Component Interface, or PVCI, is a standard intended to simplify the interfacing of peripheral cores to on-chip buses in a system-on-a-chip, by standardizing the interface between a core's internals and its bus wrapper. We provide results of experiments intended to determine the power, performance, and size overhead associated with using a PVCI bus wrapper versus using a non-PVCI bus wrapper, and versus using no bus wrapper at all. The results demonstrate that using a bus wrapper may result in only small performance, power and size overhead versus using no wrapper, though even that performance overhead can be reduced or eliminated using pre-fetching. The results also demonstrate that using a PVCI bus wrapper yields no significant additional power, performance or size overhead compared with a non-PVCI bus wrapper.

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