IO and multiprotocol processing in highly demanding embedded architectures

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IO and network management are faced with increasing speed requirements

cetrac.io, Nov. 30, 2020 – 

Low physical I/O protocols or device management have always been handled by a hardware device, simply because line survey or reaction to a bus change need very short reaction time. It would require a huge amount of processing power in order to be fast enough to comply with the bus management physical and timing requirements.

But once the physical layer has been handled by these components, it can still be up to a processor to undertake data handling and low-level protocol management.

Dedicated process and interruption management are the common answer in order to accomplish these tasks.

Hence high bandwidth protocols and large amount of data generate a large stress on processor load. Real time activities needed for this purpose generatea large amount of context switching, at the expense of calculation and data processing activities which should be the main objectives of the processing power.

If you add the data values surveillance and availability managementand/or if you consider encryption/decryption, the overhead of I/O management is hardly scalable.

In the case of Ethernet TCP/IP this difficulty has already been observed and off the shelf Ethernet boards can now be in charge of a larger amount of the protocol handling lowering the TCP/IP stack processing needs.

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