System-on-Chip deployment with MCAPI abstraction and IP-XACT metadata

Abstract

IP-XACT, the recent IEEE1685 standard, defines metadata format for IP packing and integration in System-on-Chip designs. It was originally proposed for hardware descriptions, but we have extended it for software, HW/SW mappings and application communication abstraction. The latter is realized with Multicore Association MCAPI that is a lightweight message passing interface. In this paper we present as a work-in-progress how we utilize all these to deploy and move application tasks between different platforms for FPGA prototyping, execution acceleration or verification. The focus is on the metadata format since it is a foundation for automation and tool development. The design flow is illustrated with two case studies: A motion JPEG encoder and a 12-node workload model of video object plane decoder (VOPD). These are deployed to PC and Altera and Xilinx FPGA boards in five variations. The results are reported as the deployment time for both non-recurring and deployment specific tasks. Setting up a new deployment is a matter of hours when there is an IP-XACT library of HW and SW components.