Using IP-XACT Metadata for a TLM modeling Flow

By Jack Donovan, Edwin Dankert (Duolog Technologies)

Abstract

Many design organizations are evolving their flows to an Executable Live Specification (ELS) driven methodology and making huge gains in designer productivity because of increased and coherent communications among all the SoC design disciplines (RTL design, Functional Verification, Software Development, TLM modeling, ....). The ELS methodology has metadata at its core where the design data common to the different flows of the SoC design process are centrally stored. A metadata driven methodology allows automatic generation of netlists and design IP skeletons from a central database that contains registers, ports, interfaces, and other common design data. IP-XACT is commonly used to store the metadata. This paper explores how to use IP-XACT to represent the necessary data to generate SystemC/TLM netlists and components The results of this paper are the outcome of analyzing two use cases : • Designs originally intended for RTL • Designs originally intended for TLM/SystemC The goal was to generate SystemC/TLM leaf cells and SystemC/TLM interconnect. We primarily focused on these two use cases although there are several other desirable use cases. The majority of our recommendations resulted from the second use case: designs originally intended for TLM/SystemC. We will start by summarizing the TLM/SystemC requirements that we derived from the use cases; we will then visit the necessary IP-XACT background information, and then present our conclusions.