Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition User Guide: Platform Designer

ID 683364
Date 12/15/2018
Public
Document Table of Contents

2.3.1. Implementing Concurrency With Multiple Masters

Implementing concurrency requires multiple masters in a Platform Designer system. Systems that include a processor contain at least two master interfaces because the processors include separate instruction and data masters. You can categorize master components as follows:

  • General purpose processors, such as Nios® II processors
  • DMA (direct memory access) engines
  • Communication interfaces, such as PCI Express
Because Platform Designer generates an interconnect with slave-side arbitration, every master interface in a system can issue transfers concurrently, if they are not posting transfers to the same slave. Concurrency is limited by the number of master interfaces sharing any particular slave interface. If a design requires higher data throughput, you can increase the number of master and slave interfaces to increase the number of transfers that occur simultaneously. The example below shows a system with three master interfaces.
Figure 47.  Avalon® Multiple Master Parallel AccessIn this Avalon® example, the DMA engine operates with Avalon® -MM read and write masters. The yellow lines represent active simultaneous connections.


Figure 48. AXI Multiple Master Parallel AccessIn this example, the DMA engine operates with a single master, because in AXI, the write and read channels on the master are independent and can process transactions simultaneously. There is concurrency between the read and write channels, with the yellow lines representing concurrent datapaths.