Experiments with the Peripheral Virtual Component Interface

The Peripheral Virtual Component Interface (PVCI) is a standard that is intended to simplify the interfacing of peripheral cores to on-chip buses in a system-on-a-chip, by standardizing the interface between a core's internals and its bus wrapper. We provide the results of experiments that are intended to determine the power, performance and size overhead associated with using a PVCI bus wrapper versus using a non-PVCI bus wrapper, and versus using no bus wrapper at all. The results demonstrate that using a bus wrapper may result in only small performance, power and size overhead versus using no wrapper, though even that performance overhead can be reduced or eliminated by using prefetching. The results also demonstrate that using a PVCI bus wrapper yields no significant additional power, performance or size overhead compared with a non-PVCI bus wrapper.