An FPGA based verification platform for HyperTransport 3.x

In this paper we present a verification platform designed for HyperTransport 3.x (HT3) applications. HyperTransport 3.x is a very low latency and high bandwidth chip-to-chip interconnect which is particularly used in AMDs novel Opteron processor series. As it is an open protocol, a broad application range exists ranging from southbridge chips over closely coupled accelerators to add in cards. Its main advantage over PCI-express is that it allows direct connection to the CPU resulting in significantly improved latency performance. To enable the development of new HyperTransport products we herein present the very first FPGA based prototyping platform for HT3.x. Such a platform is enormously valuable as new designs can be tested in real world systems before producing an costly application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Due to the high operating frequencies of HT3.x an FPGA based solution is extremely challenging as we will describe in this paper. Our presented architecture is evaluated and implemented in the form of a printed circuit board (PCB). This add-in card represents the world´s first available HyperTransport 3 device. Early adopters of HT3 benefit from the results of this work for rapid prototyping and hardware/software coverification of new HT3 designs and products.