Automatic generation of component wrappers by composition of hardware library elements starting from communication service specification

Abstract

A system-on-chip is composed of heterogeneous components interacting through a communication network. Wrappers are hardware components aimed to adapt these heterogeneous components to the network. Such an adaptation can be specified as a set of provided and required services, according to communication requirements and available resources. System-on-chip designers are required to quickly adapt to the fast changing system specifications, but the design of a wrapper can be time consuming. So this paper presents a new methodology for their automatic generation starting from a communication service specification. This specification, already used in the computer network community, is refined to an RTL model using a systematic library based approach. The effectiveness of the methodology is shown on an example.