Austin, Texas — The explosion in multicore designs has given birth to the Multicore Association, with working groups aimed at developing standard interfaces to debug and EDA tools, as well as discussions on how to proceed with an interchip communications protocol that the group has adopted.
“Connecting up two ARM cores, for example, on the same chip has not been that big of a challenge. But we haven’t had a real harmonious environment for working with separate multicore chips on the same board,” said association chairman Markus Levy, who also runs the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC).