Easy SoC design with VC1 SystemC adapters

A system on chip (SoC) contains a large number of components including hard cores, soft cores and basic standard cells. Short time to market and rich functionality requirements have driven design houses to adopt the SoC design flow. The complexity of SoC design requires the use of IPs from many different sources in order to reduce time-to-market windows. However, it is important that standardization emerges in the industry to enable the import and export of key IP modules. Thus a standard is very useful. A standard such as VSIA's virtual component interface has its usefulness in allowing easy integration of IP. In this paper we suggest a top-down methodology (L.Cai et al., 2002) from SystemC to silicon. In our methodology, we focus on methods to make design flow smooth, efficient and easy by allowing a rapid integration of communication. The communication integration is based on a custom library of interface adapters that use the VCI standard. This library aims to perform the interface synthesis which allows heterogeneous IPs to communicate in a plug-and-play fashion in the same system.