EPIDETOX: An ESL platform for integrated circuit design and tool exploration

This paper presents an electronic system-level integrated development platform, called EPIDETOX, to help designers build transaction level models of IP designs, integrate IP designs into SOC systems, construct system virtual prototypes, and analyze the performance of various application software and hardware. EPIDETOX consists of three parts, namely an integrated design environment, a collection of IP/system designs, and a suite of design tools. With this platform, IP/system designers are allowed to deal with various system-level design issues such as the whole system simulation/verification, algorithm & architecture co-design, low power design, SOC testing/debugging, etc. All the capabilities of EPIDETOX are provided via a friendly graphic user interface, which makes EPIDETOX a powerful and very easy-to-use ESL integrated development platform. Two case studies, one for an H.264 encoder design and the other for SOC test architecture exploration, are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of EPIDETOX in system designs.