UVM Reference Flow
Design Overview
UVM Reference Flow version 1.0
December 2011
Table of Contents
Acronyms .......................................................................................................................................... 3
Licenses, Terms and Conditions ...................................................................................................... 4
Scope ............................................................................................................................................. 4
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 4
System AHB bus............................................................................................................................... 5
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Acronyms
Acronym Meaning
AHB Advanced High Performance Bus
AMBA Advanced Micro-controller Bus Architecture
APB Advanced Peripheral Bus
SoC System On Chip
IP Intellectual Property
MAC Media Access Controller
UVM Universal Verification Methodology
DMA Direct Memory Access
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Licenses, Terms and Conditions
Refer to the README_terms_and_conditions.txt file located in the installation directory in the
<UVM Reference Flow Install area>.
Scope
This document provides the architectural design for the Ethernet Switch SoC design, which
used as the basis to demonstrate the UVM reference flow.
Introduction
The functional block diagram of the complete Ethernet switch SoC design is shown in Figure 1.
It has an Ethernet MAC, a processor (Open Risc) and a look-up table to carry out the address
resolution. This document specifies the architecture of the SoC.
Figure 1: Ethernet Switch Design
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The SoC has the following key components:
1. Processor Subsystem
a. An Open RISC Processor
b. AMBA AHB network interconnect
c. On-chip Memories and memory controllers
d. DMA
2. Open Core Ethernet Media Access controller (MAC)
3. Address Look up table (ALUT)
4. Support and Control functions. For instance power management and peripherals like
UART, SPI, GPO, timer etc
In normal operation, the data flow occurs between two or more of the Ethernet MAC ports. An
incoming Ethernet packet from a MAC interface is switched to one or more (broadcast) MAC
ports based on the result from Address Lookup up Table (ALUT).
The switching is performed by the embedded firmware running on the processor. The firmware
is responsible to allocate the buffers (in the on-chip RAM) into which the MACs can source and
sink packets. When a complete packet is available in the memory, the firmware is notified about
it. The firmware then parses the packet, extracts the headers and does a lookup on the ALUT.
Based on the lookup result, the packet is switched by the firmware to one or more MACs.
System AHB bus
The SoC is built around a multilayer AHB bus which inter-connects the CPU, the memory and
peripherals.
A multi-layer implementation can support more parallel accesses than a single layer bus.
AHB masters on the bus initiate data transfers and AHB slaves respond to the data requests. The
masters are not memory mapped, while the slaves are memory mapped. Refer to the memory
map at the end of the spec for information on the slaves’ memory map.
The bus has a 32-bit data width and runs at half the CPU speed. At 100MHz, the bus can
support burst data rates of 400 MB per second for each master-slave channel.
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Masters Slaves
MAC
0 M0
Multi
Layer
AHB SRAM
S1
MAC
1 M1
ROM
S2
MAC
2 M2
AHB APB
S3 to Bus
APB
MAC
3 M3
SMC
S4
CPU WB
To M4 DMA
AHB (Conf)
S5
DMA
M5
AHB
S6 APB
to
Bus
APB
The figure above shows six masters connected to six slaves through the multi-layer AHB.
The APB peripherals interface to the AHB bus through a translating AHB-to-APB bridge.
The table below depicts the connectivity between masters and slaves in the design.
An “X” indicates that access is legal.
SRAM ROM APB SMC DMA APB Bridge
Master S1 S2 Bridge S3 S4 S5 S6
MAC0 X
MAC1 X
MAC2 X
CPU X X X X X X
DMA X
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