A CSCWD framework for component-based SOC design

Abstract

Silicon technology now allows designers to build chips consisting of tens of millions of transistors. This technology promises new levels of system integration onto a single chip (system-on-chip, SOC), but also presents significant challenges to the chip designers. In order to implement such systems, designers are increasingly relying on reuse of intellectual property (IP) components. Component-based SOC design (CBSD) becomes one of the most effective solutions to improve system development quality and productivity. In a complex SOC design, multiple engineering design teams are required to work cooperatively in order to design a product, each team may focus on only a part of the whole system. So component exchange, configuration and integration are the core technologies and frontier research areas in CBSD. This work presents a CSCWD framework based on extensible markup language (XML) specification for IP component exchange and integration.