HW/SW Auto-Coupling for Fast IP Integration in SoC Designs

IP intergration in SoC nowadays contains two design aspects, i.e. hardware interface and software driver. The hardware interface supports necessary signal mapping, protocol translation and data buffering so that an IP can adapt to various system architectures. The software driver provides IP access controls from the software domain in the presence of operating system. The automation of both design processes in a coupling manner is addressed in this paper. We first outline the methodology of automatic interface synthesis and elaborate on the topics of signal mapping, protocol conversion and interface template architecture. We next present the framework of a baseline driver generator and detail the generation schemes of basic file operations and other functions and driver settings. Both tools are linked to form a HW/SW auto-coupling design suite, which features minimum user knowledge toward the hardware and OS details in usage. Some design examples on the interface synthesis tool and an JPEG codec HW/SW codesign example on the integrated design suite are provided to prove the effectiveness of the proposed system.