Specification of non-functional intellectual property components

In its most general sense, intellectual property components (IPs) refer to any design artifacts that are reusable. While the specification of the functional IPs, such as behavioral and RTL specifications have been widely investigated, the specifications of others, such as timing, constraints, layouts and architectures are largely ad hoc. This leads to different standard or proprietary file/database formats with interoperatability problems, which eventually hinder the distribution and integration of IPs. In this paper, we address the difficult problem of integrating semantically diverse non-functional IPs by the use of a new, extensible language called Babel. Despite its simple 1-page grammar, Babel is frontend for a powerful IP-based design infrastructure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by two case studies, one for the creation of parameterized memory IPs and one for the creation of processor IPs.