System Board Interfaces

Interconnects between boards, sub-systems and large systems

The system or board interface relates to the communication established between two or more boards or sub-systems through a common interface, which may be by a bus, network or wired entity. Depending on the requirements, the designer can select from a large list of protocols.  These can include serial or parallel, low-power or low-latency, and, high bandwidth vs quality of service. A highly integrated modular architecture is specially designed to incorporate functionality distributed across multiple sub-systems.  All of these sub-systems must have access to each other’s memory, resources and connectivity.  Hence, it is important to have an interface that is related to the unique flow.

In VisualSim Architect, the protocols are implemented according to the standard.  The implementation is open and user can modify any of the internals without requiring a special license.  The interfaces can be connected to traffic generator, trace files, processors, FPGA and a host of other devices.  The working of the interface can be judged through parameters like the throughput and the latency, which depicts how efficient the connection is. Here you can build a PCI model or PCIe which is a high-speed serial bus for fast access to memory and storage. Also you can connect an SSD to NVMe over PCIe.