A protocol converter for nonblocking protocols

Abstract

A protocol converter must interface two communicating components if their protocols are incompatible. This paper presents a method to implement a protocol converter for nonblocking protocols since previous protocol converters insisted that both their input protocols be blocking protocols with a unlimited blocking period although many protocols in use are nonblocking protocols or blocking protocols whose blocking period is limited. Since a protocol converter for nonblocking protocols of a read operation may not exist, the existence must be determined by examining whether two input protocols satisfy several temporal constraints. If it can exist, the duals of the input protocols must be implemented to execute the input protocols because a protocol and its dual match for communication. We present algorithms that schedule the execution of the duals of the two input protocols. A circuit for a control signal must also be implemented to trigger the execution of the dual of the slave protocol when the master protocol is executed. If necessary, message buffers must be implemented to resolve the timing mismatch of the message transfer periods of the two scheduled input protocols. The experimental results show that our protocol converter supports nonblocking protocols. The same method can be applied to blocking protocols with a limited blocking period. The result in this paper widens the application of protocol converters.