CoreConnect is amicroprocessorbus-architecture fromIBM forsystem-on-a-chip (SoC) designs. It was designed to ease the integration and reuse of processor, system, and peripheralcores within standard and custom SoC designs. As a standard SoCdesign 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 adevice 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 competingAMBA 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 asCadence,Ericsson,Lucent,Nokia,Siemens andSynopsys.
The CoreConnect is an integral part of IBM's embedded offerings and is used extensively in theirPowerPC 4x0 based designs. In the past,Xilinx was using CoreConnect as the infrastructure for all of their embedded processor designs.