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Reqrsp Interface

The reqrsp_interface (request and response) is a custom interface based on common principles found in other interconnects such as AXI or TileLink. It has only two channels (request and response) which are handshaked according to the AMBA standard:

  • The initiator asserts valid. The assertion of valid must not depend on ready.
  • Once valid has been asserted all data must remain stable.
  • The receiver asserts ready whenever it is ready to receive the transaction.
  • When both valid and ready are high the transaction is successful.

The bus is little endian.

Channels

The two channels are:

  • Request (q): The initiator requests a memory transaction. Supported are read, write, atomic memory operations, load-linked and store-conditional pairs.
  • Response (p): Every transaction which was requested ultimately returns a response. For reads the response channel returns the read response, for writes the response acknowledges that the data is committed and subsequent reads will return the last written value, for atomic operations the data before the memory operations has happened is being returned. For load-linked the the read response is returned, for store-conditionals the the success code is returned. Additionally, the response channel carries error information.

Sizes

Data bus size of 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024-bit are supported. Atomic memory operations are 32 bit or 64 bit for bus sizes greater than 32.

Data Alignment

The data is always bus-aligned. similar to AXI. For reads the address and size fields indicate which data is valid. Similarly for writes the address and size fields in addition to the write strobe field indicate valid bytes (8 bit of data). Atomics and LR/SCs addresses are always naturally aligned to their size.

Ordering

Transactions on the request channel are always strongly ordered (as if they would all use the same ID in AXI terms). Reads and writes are ordered with respect to each other (that needs to be maintained when translating to AXI).

Atomic Memory Operations

Atomic memory operations supported are:

Operation Description
Swap Swaps the values.
Add Signed addition.
And, Or, Xor Bitwise and, or, and xor operation.
Max, Maxu Signed and unsigned maximum operation.
Min, Minu Signed and unsigned minimum operation.
Lr Places a reservation on the given memory address
Sc Conditional store, returns 0 on q.data if successful, 1 otherwise.

The operation reads the value at the given address and returns the read value on the p channel. The same memory location is updated with the data and operation supplied on the q.amo and q.data signals. The q.write signal must be set to 1'b0.

Load-Reserved/Store-conditional

The q.amo field carries the information on whether the transaction encodes an LR/SC.

Operation Description
Lr Places a reservation on the given memory address
Sc Conditional store, returns 0 on q.data if successful, 1 otherwise.

For Sc and LR the q.write signal must be set to 0.

Error

The p channel carries additional error information:

  • 0: The access is ok.
  • 1: The access has encountered an error.