OOCE: Object-Oriented Communication Engine for SoC Design

For decades, software middlewares have tackled with the heterogeneity and interconnectivity problems in computer networks with success. These problems are recurrent in the design of complex systems-on chip with a large number of components of different nature (including SW and HW modules). In this paper we present an object- oriented communication engine (OOCE) based on the architectural concepts used in software middlewares that unifies the inter-communication interface for both HW and SW elements. The infrastructure provided by the OOCE introduces a low-overhead abstraction layer that can be easily used to implement several parallel programming models. An implementation of this approach has been made for the Xilinx-V2Pro platform.