Research And Implementation On Virtual Component Library Supporting HW/SW Partition In SoC Design

Under the double pressure of the increasing of design complexity and the decreasing of time-to-market, the great gap between design methodology and IC manufacture technique has been becoming the bottleneck that constraints the development of IC industry. New system level languages and platform based design methodology have been studied deeply and widely. Hardware/Software partitioning is the key link of platform based design; Its reasonable result deeply affects the cores in function, performance and flexibility.This paper further studies platform based design methodology and SystemC, which is one of system level design languages; puts forward the models of virtual component level, virtual component library and virtual component unit supporting Hardware/Software partitioning and the method of wrapping a virtual component unit; designs and implements a virtual component library management system and two virtual component units of memory and USB controller based on digital stream application. We embed the virtual component library management tool into SOC-CDE, and then obtain the good experimental result proved by the instance.The main studies of this paper includes:1. Survey the system level design method under the supporting of platform based design methodology and system level design language, design the SOC-CDE system based on hierarchical platform design methodology.2. Put forward the model and the method of designing and wrapping a virtual component supporting Hardware/Software partitioning.Virtual component does not need all details of hardware implementation because it is the abstraction of a type of real components. There are three demands in designing a virtual component, include: first, we should describe the virtual component with system level design language. Second, we achieve the goal of plug-and-play by using OCP to wrap the virtual component interface. Third, we consider the performance model in creating a new component, which is the basis of virtual component level SoC system simulation and evaluation.3. Study the procedure of constructing the virtual component level SoC system and choose transaction level model as the standard of constructing a virtual communication component.This paper analyses the difference of various hierarchies in modeling the virtual component level communication, and then chooses transaction level model as the standard of constructing a virtual communication component, which is adapt to Hardware/Software Co-design.4. Design and implement a virtual component library management system.With considering the demand of virtual component designing in function, performance, interface and so on, this paper designs a virtual component management tool.5. Construct a virtual component library based on digital stream application.This paper analyses the procedure of designing the MP3 player under SOC-CDE environment, constructs a virtual component library based on digital stream application, and then elaborate on the methods and steps of creating a new virtual component as the examples of memory and USB controller.