Executable model based design methodology for fast prototyping of mobile network protocol: A case study on MIPI LLI

Upcoming mobile communication systems are more complex and comprise of sophisticated functionality to enhance their performance. To expedite their time to market, the RTL development and verification cycle time has to be improved. This paper puts an emphasis to improve the prototyping phase by using Model Based Design technique comprising of Simulink HDL coder, HDL verifier and rapid FPGA prototyping utilizing FPGA in loop co-simulation. As a case study, the MIPI Low Latency Interface (LLI) layer protocol is implemented. The results conferred in this paper illustrates the acceleration in hardware development cycle by reducing the RTL development time and simulation time required for verification of the design under test. In this paper comparison of the automatic generated HDL code from the Simulink HDL coder to that of manual handwritten code is performed. The comparison targets the time to market, area, power and timing constrains for the Data Link Layer (DLL) of MIPI LLI for both the procedures. The automatic HDL code generated from the Simulink Model using MATLAB R2016b, and the manual hand-written Verilog code for the Data Link Layer are synthesized for CMOS 45nm standard cell ASIC technology. The comparison result shows that time to market value is reduced by more than half with significant decrease of 11% to 17% in the operating speed, the area and power consumption is also increased by 25% and 29% respectively.