GRIP: Grammar-based IP integration and packaging for acceleration-rich SoC designs

Increased hardware IP reuse is required to meet the productivity demands for the future complex Systems-on-Chip (SoC). Nowadays, IP integration is enabled using standardized meta-data formats such as IP-XACT. We present a new concept called grammar-based IP integration and packaging (GRIP), which additionally encodes design integration knowledge into a set of graph re-writing rules using standard IP-XACT. These GRIP rules are packaged into a domain-specific library of IP blocks. The library can be supplied by an IP provider along to an SoC architect. An integration tool can automatically use the GRIP rules to search the design space using the integration knowledge of the IP provider. The tool generates all design alternatives with different trade-offs for the SoC architect. We demonstrate the GRIP approach on a computer vision IP library for FPGA-based SoCs. Eighteen functional design alternatives are automatically generated within a few hours using IP integration knowledge encoded by the GRIP rules.