Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society (한국산학기술학회논문지)

The Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society (한국산학기술학회)
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Automatic Virtual Platform Generation for Fast SoC Verification

고속 SoC 검증을 위한 자동 가상 플랫폼 생성

  • Jung, Jun-Mo (School of electronic & Information Eng., Kunsan National University)
  • Published : 2008.10.31
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Abstract

In this paper, we propose an automatic generation method of transaction level(TL) model from algorithmic model to verify system specification fast and effectively using virtual platform. The TL virtual platform including structural properties such as timing, synchronization and real-time is one of the effective verification frameworks. However, whenever change system specification or HW/SW mapping, we must rebuild virtual platform and additional design/verification time is required. And the manual description is very time-consuming and error-prone process. To solve these problems, we build TL library which consists of basic components of virtual platform such as CPU, memory, timer. We developed a set of design/verification tools in order to generate a virtual platform automatically. Our tools generate a virtual platform which consists of embedded real-time operating system (RTOS) and hardware components from an algorithmic modeling. And for communication between HW and SW, memory map and device drivers are generated. The effectiveness of our proposed framework has been successfully verified with a Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) and H.264 algorithm. We claim that our approach enables us to generate an application specific virtual platform $100x{\tims}1000x$ faster than manual designs. Also, we can refine an initial platform incrementally to find a better HW/SW mapping. Furthermore, application software can be concurrently designed and optimized as well as RTOS by the generated virtual platform

본 논문에서는 가상 플랫폼을 이용하여 빠르고 효과적으로 시스템을 검증하기 위한 추상레벨의 자동생성에 대하여 제안한다. 추상레벨 가상 플랫폼은 효과적인 검증 방법이긴 하지만 시스템이 변경될 때마다 가상 플랫폼을 재생성하고 추가적인 설계/검증을 요구되며 이 작업은 매우 많은 시간을 요구한다. 이러한 문제점을 해결하기 위하여 본 논문에서는 CPU, 메모리, UART 등을 기본적인 요소로 구성하여 추상레벨의 라이브러리로 생성하였다. 이 라이브러리를 이용하여 가상 플랫폼을 자동 생성하는 툴을 개발하였다. 이 툴은 임베디드 RTOS를 구성하는 가상 플랫폼을 자동 생성하며 HW/SW 간의 통신을 위한 메모리 맵과 디바이스 드라이버 등도 생성한다. 제안한 방법은 JPEG과 H.264에 성공적으로 적용하였으며 기존의 수동 작업에 비하여 매우 빠르게 가상 플랫폼을 자동 생성할 수 있었다.

Keywords

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