Methodology and design of a tool to co-simulate VHDL and SystemC / Metodologia e projeto de ferramenta para co-simulação entre VHDL e SystemC
AUTOR(ES)
Richard Maciel Costa
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
2008
RESUMO
In a recent past, systems were mostly constituted by well-separated parts such as microprocessors, memories and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). That simple and clear organization allowed entire systems to be designed by only a few designers through a top-down approach: from the behavioral or register transfer model (using VHDL, for instance) advancing to the transistor-to-transistor level. However, the continuous advance of the process of shrinking transistors made it possible to create entire systems integrated in a single die (called System-on-chip). Because these systems are usually constituted by many complex components, a higher abstraction level - the system level - was created, together with the associated languages, to ease the work of the designers. The languages used to model on the system level are diferent from the languages used to model on the behavioral and register-transfer levels. Therefore, the problem of how to co-verify components written in diferent abstraction levels arises; this co-verification is desirable for big projects, since it provides a way to check if the components of the target system are working together. This project presents a methodology to solve the co-simulation problem between the hardware description language VHDL and the system description languagem SystemC through the use of the Verilog Procedural Interface (VPI). We describe the methodology and also describe the framework used to validate the methodology and comparative tests between this framework and a well-known comercial tool
ASSUNTO(S)
vhdl (linguagem descritiva de hardware) systemc vhdl (computer hardware description language) systemc
