High-level modelling and automatic generation of dynamicaly reconfigurable systems

Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) has been introduced in recent years as a method to increase the flexibility of FPGA designs. However, using DPR for building complex systems remains a daunting task. Recently, approaches based on MDE and UML MARTE standard have emerged which aim to simplify the design of complex SoCs. Moreover, with the recent standardization of the IP-XACT specification, there is an increasing interest to use it in MDE methodologies to ease system integration and to enable design flow automation. In this paper we propose an MARTE/MDE approach which exploits the capabilities of IP-XACT to model and automatically generate DPR SoC designs. In particular, our goal is the creation of the structural top level description of the system and to include DPR support in the used IP cores. The generated IP-XACT descriptions are transformed to obtain the files required as inputs by the EDK flow and then synthesized to generate the netlists used by the DPR flow. The methodology is demonstrated using two CODEC cores (CAVLC and VLC) into a MicroBlaze based DPR SoC.