An approach for a flexilble interface platform

In many modern communication SoC-designs the ability of connecting to a wide range of network processors is very important. This is true especially in cases where the target system is unknown during the product definition phase, or standards are not fixed. In this paper we describe a flexible platform where the interface protocol is defined mainly by firmware. The internal firmware is driven via interrupt-events and is processed in independent tasks. In order to guarantee a fast response to these interrupts, hardware multitasking is supported by the implemented architecture. By downloading new firmware to an internal program RAM it is possible to implement new interface-protocols, to add new features or to test the hardware during chip and board production.