Resolving parameter reference management in IP-XACT using Kactus2

Modern VLSI and FPGA chip designs utilize automated generation of the structure and component configuration for different product variations. This is based on re-usable, parametrized library components, and tools for definition, assembly, configuration and generation of final HW and SW code. A product version includes several structural hierarchies, in which each component is independently reusable and must be configured for the specific product context. IEEE 1685 "IP-XACT" standardizes the component and design descriptions and the overall process. Still the challenges are very large parameter space, name-based referencing and propagation of parameter values. Practical user problems are careless parameter renaming, duplicate names, and removing a parameter definition without first removing all references to it. In this paper, we present solutions to these problems implemented in Kactus2 v2.7 that is an open-source IP-XACT tool. Our basis is automatic identifier generation and referencing. This required major changes for Kactus2 import wizards, generators as well as expression editors and evaluators. The implementation was carried out in C++/Qt5 and we modified and added 5k LOC compared to Kactus2 v2.6. According to several use cases analysis the new solution practically eliminates the user errors in the parameter referencing, which significantly improves productivity.