May 29, 2012 -- The OCP International Partnership (OCP-IP) has announced the availability of a new OCP book titled "Introduction to Open Core Protocol: Fastpath to System-On-Chip Design." The book provides a hands-on, how-to guide for semiconductor design. Its comprehensive Open Core Protocol introduction includes real "usage examples" not available in the full specification. It is a powerful training aid for university students, those just beginning to use the Open Core Protocol (OCP) socket in real-world design activities, and a valuable reference for experienced users.

The book introduces OCP not as a conventional hardware-communications protocol, but as a meta-protocol: a means for describing and capturing the communications requirements of an IP core, and mapping them to a specific set of signals with known, standardized semantics. Readers learn the capabilities of OCP as a semiconductor hardware-interface specification that enables different system-on-chip (SOC) cores communication. The presented OCP methodology enables intellectual property designers to design core interfaces in standard ways. This facilitates reusing OCP-compliant cores within multiple SOC designs which, in turn, drastically reduces design times, support costs, and overall electronic/ SOC costs.

The book was written by W. David Schwaderer, author of 10 previous technology-focused books and contains an OCP introduction as well as chapters on write operations, OCP signals and signal groups, burst extensions, timing diagrams, OCP Tags, threads, and debug.