Research On Key Techniques Of Model-Driven System-level Hardware/Software Co-Design

With the high-speed development of micro-electronics and very large scale integrated circuits (VLSI), hardware/software co-design (HW/SW co-design) is of wider and wider applications. The complexity and heterogeneous nature of hardware/software represent the degree of never heard of before. And with the continued advancement and maturity in technologies, the design is transferring from RTL level to system level. But now the research of the high-level design in this field is still inadequate. The researchers pay more attention to the design of RTL level and lower-level chip. Meanwhile, the system design lacks specifications and the traditional modeling technologies can't satisfy the requests of system-level design, which results in a longer period of design and difficulty in maintenances. The effective solution to these problems is to improve abstract levels of design, adopt the technology of MDA and use the model-driven method in the whole developing . process. This paper aimed to resolve some key technological problems, such as system functional modeling, automatic mapping between different models (from ECDM to SystemC) by merging the fruit of the advanced MDA technology in HW/SW co-design and explore a model-driven SW/HW co-design approach. So the paper effectively separated HW/SW implement from the functional specification and enlarged the design space by reusing components. At the same time, it enhanced design efficiency on the basis of co-synthesis and validation of different abstract levels. The major work and innovative contributions of this dissertation are concluded as follows:â–  The author proposed a system-level design flow based on model-driven considering the rapid update and shorter design period of consumable digital application products. The function specification uses a real-time process model, ECDM (extended co-design model), and the realization model is SystemC model with the principal characteristic of SW/HW co-design. Accordingly, this approach can effectively separate function design from detailed HW/SW realization. At the initial stages of design, the flow can validate systematic functions, correct design errors and reduce design cost. This paper adopts automatic model mapping to realize system-level synthesis and make use of component reuse to optimize the design space. So the solution can improve the efficiency of design and development.â–  The paper extended the real-time characteristics of the existed CDM (co-design model) and then made it to enhance the ability of system modeling effectively. The extended model is named as ECDM model. The CDM, as a system-level...