What is "coreconnect"

__NOTOC__ CoreConnect is a microprocessor bus-architecture from IBM for system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs. It was designed to ease the integration and reuse of processor, system, and peripheral cores within standard and custom SoC designs. As a standard SoC design point, it serves as the foundation of IBM or non-IBM devices. Elements of this architecture include the processor local bus (PLB), the on-chip peripheral bus (OPB), a bus bridge, and a device control register (DCR) bus. High-performance peripherals connect to the high- bandwidth, low- latency PLB. Slower peripheral cores connect to the OPB, which reduces traffic on the PLB. CoreConnect has bridging capabilities to the competing AMBA bus architecture, allowing reuse of existing SoC-components.

IBM makes the CoreConnect bus available as a no-fee, no-royalty architecture to tool-vendors, core IP-companies, and chip-development companies. As such it is licensed by over 1500 electronics companies such as Cadence, Ericsson, Lucent, Nokia, Siemens and Synopsys.

The CoreConnect is an integral part of IBM's Power Architecture offering and is used extensively in their PowerPC 4x0 based designs. Xilinx uses CoreConnect as the infrastructure for all of their embedded processor designs even though only a few are Power Architecture based.