An Improved SoC Design Methodology And Tool Chain Based On MDA

Uncertainties in system specification arise due to SoC complexities as the chip size grows rapidly with the ever more complicated applications. Specifications are required to be verified at very early stage of design flow, even produced from models directly, which is the philosophy of MDA (Model Driven Architecture). We propose a new design flow from UML(Unified Modeling Language) to synthesizable RTL code which will be the trend to solve the problem in future. As a brand new modeling language, UML has been widely used in software engineering and makes a lot of contribute, however, it is only a start for its utilization in SoC design. Currently there is some research work related to this field with some preliminary achievements. In our work, we mainly focus on the cycle accurate modeling, and make some improvements and extensions based on the previous research job. By using a new model mapping rule, we can make the UML model work in a cycle accurate way, and successfully translate the UML model into executable SystemC code. We choose a typical SA-DCT (shape adaptive DCT) architecture which is used in MPEG4 video decoding standard as the target our modeling is to verify our modeling method and implementation. During the experiment, we show that our method can be used to solve the problems of interpretation of complex state machine, effective modeling of clock control unit and translation from UML2.0 to SystemC code. We also improve the previous XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) parser to make it support new modeling features. We compare the results of our work and the ones of previous work to testify the feasibility of our modeling method. Our final result can be use to support the idea that UML2.0 can be used to build a circuit model featuring cycle accuracy. This result once again highlights that our methodology is very helpful to the verification of system design at an early stage of design flow.