Design of a high-performance PCI interface for an SCI network

The electronic design, test and application of a PCI-SCI bridge supporting shared memory, message passing and DMA is described. The objectives for des igning a bridge between the IE EE 1596 SCI standard and the popular PCI bus were applications-in high-energy physics where large-scale processor farms are needed, to process large amounts of data in real time. The SCI's share d memory paradigm is particularly attractive for such multiprocessor applic ations. The functional units of the bridge, including PCI target and master are programmed into FPGAs, These functions are developed in VHDL and then simulated, synthesised, placed and routed using advanced FPGA development t ools. The test results in terms of latency and bandwidth are satisfactory a nd meet our objectives.