Motor Control IP Design and Quality Evaluation from the Viewpoint of Reuse (ICCAS 2004)

In this paper we designed the motor control IP Core and evaluate its quality from the viewpoint of IP reuse. The most attractive merit of this methodology, so called IP-based hardware design, is hardware reuse. Although various vendors designed hardware with the same specification and got the same functional results, all that IPs is not the same quality in the reuse aspect. As tremendous calls for SoC have been increased, associated research about IP quality standard, VSIA(Virtual Socket Interface Alliance) and STARC(Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Center), has been doing best to make the IP quality evaluation system. And they made what conforms to objective IP design standard. We suggest the methodology to evaluate our own designed motor control IP quality with this standard. To attain our goal, we designed motor control IP that could control the motor velocity and position with feedback compensation algorithm. This controller has some IP blocks : digital filter, quadrature decoder, position counter, motion compensator, and PWM generator. Each block's functionality was verified by simulator ModelSim and then its quality was evaluated. To evaluate the core, We use Vnavigator for lint test and ModelSim for coverage check. During lint process, We adapted the OpenMORE's rule based on RMM (Reuse Methodology Manual) and it could tell us our IP's quality in a manner of the scored value form. If it is high, its quality is also high, and vice versa. During coverage check ModelSim-SE is used for verifying how our test circuits cover designs. This objective methods using well-defined commercial coverage metrics could perform a quantitative analysis of simulation completeness. In this manner, We evaluated the designed motor control IP's quality from the viewpoint of reuse. This methodology will save the time and cost in designing SoC that should integrate various IPs. In addition to this, It can be the guide for comparing the equally specified IP's quality. After all, we are continuously looking forward to enhancing our motor control IP in the aspect of not only functional perfection but also IP reuse to prepare for the SoC-Compliant motor control IP design.