Communicating in an integrated circuit using hardware-managed virtual channels

Abstract

Embodiments herein describe a switchboard coupled to a system bus in an integrated circuit for managing the flow of data between different entities coupled to the bus (e.g., processing cores, accelerators, memory controllers, input/output (I/O) interfaces, and the like). The switchboard is a hardware module that may be tasked with assigning different system bus addresses (or range of addresses) to each of the entities coupled to the bus. These addresses may be unique such that each entity can be uniquely identified by its assigned address. The address space of the system bus also includes managed address that are reserved—i.e., are not assigned to any particular entity. The switchboard is tasked with assigning the managed addresses (also referred to as virtual channels) to an entity which can be used to enable direct communication between hardware entities using the system bus.