Development And Verefication Research On Multi-Media System-on-Chip

With the development of semiconductor technology and the improvements in multi-media algorithm research, multi-media processing system can be integrated into one chip, which called multi-media system-on-chip (SoC). In this paper, we describe a media SoC - MediaSoC serials, which are developed by the Department of Information Science and Electronic Engineering in Zhejiang Unversity. MediaSoC consists of two programmable processor cores: a RISC core RISC3200 and a RISC/DSP core MediaDSP3200. For the application of media processing, MediaSoC also includes some ASIC module such as digital video encoder, memory controller, DMA controller, and other interface units. The chip referred by this paper has been successful fabricated by 0.18μm technology just one time, the test result shows that MediaSoC can be widely used in a range of multi-media application, such as signal processing, audio/video decoding and image processing.The implementation and verification of media SoC are difficult because of its complicated architecture and advanced fabricated technology. This paper takes MediaSoC for example; mainly discuss the synthesis, physical implementation and static verification for media SoC. The main contents and works in this paper include:As the bridge which links logic design and physical implementation, synthesis is becoming more and more important in modern IC design. For the dual-core feature, we discuss the architecture design which benefits synthesis. On the other hand, MediaSoC takes the physical synthesis flow because of the limitation of traditional logic synthesis. During the working in MediaSoC synthesis, we tightly integrate logic synthesis and physical synthesis, and use different strategy in different synthesis phases.In order to discover bugs in the physical design as early as we can, we build physical prototyping in the design of MediaSoC firstly, which can compress physical feasibility stage down to a few hours. The establishment of prototyping enables the engineers to evaluate design trade-offs and creates a realistic implementation plan. Several key issues are also studied in physical implementation stage, including physical module planning, power grid design, clocktree design and timing, and with the solution to the problems above, we ensure the success of chip implementation.MediaSoC software verification is also studied in this paper, including dynamic verification and static verification. Dynamic verification is divided into module verification and system verification. Furthermore, three principles are suggested in static verification of MediaSoC, which includes step-by-step verification, hierarchical/flattened co-verification and static/dynamic co-verification. By using software verification, we can not only verify the function and performance of design, but also give some useful advice for the optimization of design, and combine verification and design tightly.