Enhancements and Applications of a Versatile Software Tool for High-Level Specification of Single-Chip Systems

Abstract

This paper describes several enhancements and various applications of a versatile and extensible software tool called QUI2VER to support integration of custom components for research prototyping in programmable logic. From higher-level specifications of components and interconnections in an input file, QUI2VER generates an output VHDL file with a desired system configuration. The value of QUI2VER stems from how abstract interfaces can be specified in support of component interconnection for system-level configuration. We have enhanced QUI2VER with multidimensional array-based and loop-based system specification capabilities. We have included enhanced support for symbolic constants, generic parameters, and arbitrary arithmetic expressions. We have also created a graphical tool to visualize component interface definitions and to support graphical system specification based on such interfaces. We demonstrate our enhancements by using QUI2VER to generate systems for single-chip implementation in programmable logic using our own intellectual property, including multi-dimensional interconnection networks, an extensible embedded processor, and a sophisticated cache-coherent multiprocessor based on our own custom pipelined 32-bit processors, split-transaction bus components, and memory components.