MCF: A Metamodeling-Based Component Composition Framework—Composing SystemC IPs for Executable System Models

Abstract

Reusing Intellectual Property (IP)-cores accompanied by automated generation of the glue-logic, and automated composability checks can help designers to create efficient system-level models quickly and correctly for fast design space exploration. Furthermore, with the rise of multiple transaction level and register-transfer level abstractions, constructing models with mixed abstraction levels is also important. A framework that allows designers to: 1) describe the structure of components, their interfaces, and their interactions, with a semantically rich visual frontend; 2) automatically select IPs from a component library-based on sound-type theoretic principles; and 3) perform constraint based checks for composability, is highly desirable in this context. A metamodel based framework brings forth further advantages. It helps in: 1) providing rigorous semantics to the visual models; 2) imposing restrictions on the model and on interactions between components through constraints expressed in a constraint language; and 3) enabling type-checking and inference-based facilities. Furthermore, using XML-based schemas to store and process meta-information about the IPs as well as the schematic visual model, allows for an IP selection and integration methodology using existing XML processing tools. With these in mind, we present MCF, a metamodeling-based component composition framework for SystemC-based IP core composition at multiple and mixed abstraction levels, with all the advantages stated above.