Integrating RTL IPs into TLM designs through automatic transactor generation
Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe
HIFsuite: tools for HDL code conversion and manipulation
EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems
metroII: A design environment for cyber-physical systems
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) - Special section on ESTIMedia'12, LCTES'11, rigorous embedded systems design, and multiprocessor system-on-chip for cyber-physical systems
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Transaction-level models promise to be the basis of the verification environment for the whole design process. Realizing this promise requires connecting transaction-level and register-transfer-level (RTL) blocks through a transactor, which translates back and forth between RTL signal-based communication and transaction-level function-call-based communication. Each transactor is associated with a pair of interfaces, one at RTL and one at transaction level. Typically, however, a pair of interfaces is associated with more than one transactor, each assuming a different role in the verification process. In this paper, we propose a methodology in which both the interfaces and their relation are captured by a single formal specification. By using the specification, we show how the code for all the transactors associated with a pair of interfaces can be automatically generated. Our synthesis algorithm avoids the state-explosion problems associated with certain features of the specification formalism, at the expense of a more sophisticated simulation algorithm. We describe three different code-generation techniques targeted at different verification languages: (1) C++; (2) Verilog; and (3) the combination of the two that is compliant with the Standard Co-Emulation Modeling Interface protocol. In addition, we present several case studies demonstrating that automatically generated transactors can indeed replace handcrafted ones in realistic designs.